Riding bikes seems to be a forever evolving thing.  You start by learning to ride, then try to acquire some skills to improve your riding experience.  With each skill mastered, comes the need to try to do something harder, more challenging.  Well, how about trying to ride a bicycle built for two?

A few weeks back Ogre and I were allowed to borrow a friend’s mountain tandem to see if we would enjoy the experience.  We had played with the idea of getting one for a while, but I was nervous about the discrepancy in our ride levels.  I had heard that matching your cadence is really important in riding a tandem.  We ended our demo ride with big smiles and a decision that a tandem would be a great addition to our bikes.  Over the following weeks we began looking through ads and discussing what features we thought would be the most important to have on our tandem.  I personally wanted a rear suspension.  The demo bike had a Thudbuster seatpost, but I felt like more suspension would be a better option.  We talked about the tandem for a couple more days and finally decided to plan to get one for our anniversary in July.

Then this past week he comes home with the news that another friend has a mountain tandem that he’s getting ready to put up for sale.  Want to try it out, he asks.  Why not.  He makes the arrangements, we get up Saturday morning, load our gear, and head out.  Morgan has the garage open and is setting up the bike so we can try it as we pull up.  He lives close to Joaquin Miller Park and has an idea of a route we can use to demo the bike.  He rode along with us giving us hints and preparing us for anything tricky up ahead.  The funniest part was him telling us how he rides this section or that one with his son so we should be ok.  We manage to complete the route without any carnage and return to his house again wearing big smiles.  What a blast!

Ogre turns to me with one question, so we doing this?  Oh, yeah!  So now we have our own tandem mountain bike to hit the trails.  It’s going to take a little while to learn how to ride the tandem together.  Other tandem riders we’ve spoken to have given us lots of great advice.  The one thing that keeps coming up is that the captain and stoker must learn some commands.   Everything from which foot to start pedaling with to when to coast have to be communicated back and forth.  It’s going to be interesting learning all new skills, but I definitely think I’m up to the challenge.

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Well long delayed but here are my pictures from Easter this year. Try out the slide show or you can go to the regular Gallery Page.

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This is all amazing to me. When I was first contacted about this I had no idea the efforts this group would wind up going to for this. The guys from Believers on Mountain Bikes and offered to put up a cross in memory of Sylvia’s passing on the Porcupine Rim trail. I thought the idea was extremely kind I have been exchanging emails with a representative talking about the event for months. Well they finally did the ride on the 5th of May and it exceeded my expectations in every way. Here are some of the comments from of the event:

We had almost no mechanicals and only one wreck in the group of THIRTY riders that come down with me. There were more BOMB riders that came down that day, not sure the total though. A lot of people asked questions (just other riders and hikers on the trail) about what the cross was for too – everyone asked me to forward on their hearfelt sypmathies to your family.

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Well yesterday would have been Sylvia’s 16th birthday. We spent the some time thinking about her and went out to sushi which I know she would have loved. Char cooked Sylvia’s favorite desert, a great Kaluha Fudge Cake.

On a related note, someone from Colorado Springs contacted me and has volunteered to do a Memorial Ride for Sylvia on the Porcupine Rim trail. He said he would put up a small cross for her and his group would stop and remember her when they passed the place where she died. I told him I thought is was a great idea. As it turns out he scheduled the ride on May 5th, Char’s birthday. Anyhow, here is a link from his site where they scheduled the ride. The group is Colorado Springs Believers on Mountain Bikes. I haven’t asked but I get the impression that they would welcome anyone who wanted to join the ride (This is confirmed see comments below).
Char and I have discussed attending the ride but I’m not sure I could return and revisit those memories yet.

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On Monday June 20th while riding with us on Porcupine Rim my daughter Sylvia died of heat stroke or dehydration. Our family is devastated right now. I have more details about it here.

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I am going on vacation over the next month and there will be a lot of traveling so I’m not sure how much posting I will be able to do on the site. Certainly there will be a lot of pictures taken and I will try to get some video’s taken as well but how quickly they will wind up here is unclear.

While I gone I plan on returning to Moab and Fruita and will certainly find many other places to ride on our trip. Other destinations at this time include South Dakota, Yellowstone National Park, Sun Valley in Idaho and lot’s of other places.

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Update: Lots of Pictures posted, I have them broken down mostly by day. I am still sorting and annotating them though. Also for the Mountain Biking fans out there you can check out the Iron Horse Trail photo’s I have up.

I’m getting an early start on getting the pictures up from our vacation by getting them up while we’re still on vacation. All family pictures so for (no riding) but there will be plenty of trail pictures later.
The first batch of pictures we are just outside of Portland spending a couple days with Martin and Elizabeth. Click here to check them out.

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Had a great ride a couple of weeks ago with the trogs at Bear Valley. We had a point to point ride planned and we were planning on going twice but somehow we got mixed up and wound up way off course and had an unexpected 5 miles of climbing so we called it a day after one run. Even with the unexpected climbing and 1 1/2 miles of hike-a-bike it was a great ride, there was some incredible buffed singletrack, lots of fun downhill, great rock gardens and a unique slickrock section.

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