I've made a personal goal to take my bike (still nameless) every Saturday morning and bike a different trail. There are a lot of trails just outside of Pocatello that vary in degree of difficulty and many of them offer spectacular views of the back country of Caribou National Forrest. The few that I've gone on have taken at least three hours to complete and have been pretty difficult. The first of many was last week at Slate Mountain and I've already posted that trip so I'll just give a little bit of the other three that I've done this past week. I also purchased some new pedals for my bike. They are Shimano SPD clip pedals that allows the user to snap the soles of his shoes into the pedal allowing for increased pedaling power due to full range of motion of the leg. It makes climbing hills much, much easier and a lot less tiring. The downside to these pedals though is the difficulty in quickly releasing from the pedal when trying to stabilize oneself from falling, so it makes for some pretty ungraceful crashes with the bike still attached. I've also purchased a cheap hand held digital video camera that I'm testing out to record some of the downhill experiences. It's not the best quality and it's shaky due to the ride but still can be enjoyable.
City CreekNow this trail isn't found in Caribou National Forrest but is located in the hills just west of my apartment. It's a nice easy little ride that you can do in half an hour and is great for a lunch break or to test out new equipment. The first half of the trail follows a creek up a little "canyon" full of trees and shrubbery. There comes a point in the trail where the rider has three different options to choose from. I've always gone up when I haven't had much time so I've always taken the shortest route. It goes up the hill and plateaus out into a dry, desert type area. It's not very aesthetic looking but there's a part of the trail called "Life Flight" or "911" which is basically a long ditch about 10 feet deep and 15 feet wide. The trail flows through the ditch like a half pipe for bikes and is quite enjoyable. I've recorded a bit of the trail on the camera and also a turf I took around a tight bend. Remember, being clipped into the pedals makes it more difficult to avoid falls like that.
City Creek
Gibson Jack TrailThis trail doesn't start out in the Forrest but it ends up there. It's a moderate-difficult trail that takes the rider up one canyon and then down another. It circumvents Gibson Jack Mountain (later on) and ends up near the beginning of the Slate Mountain trail head. The trail is a single track trail with a slow but moderate incline spanning five miles. At many points the trail can get somewhat steep and also very rocky causing for some tight maneuvering and a little walking instead of riding, but the trail is bikeable. Once you get to where the two canyons meet it's all downhill from there. Its a double track trail on the way down and goes through some forest and grassy plains of the canyon. It's a beautiful and exhilarating ride. I went on this with some friends from class and it took us about three and a half hours to complete the trail. Once the trail was over we rode back along the highway to our vehicles. Luckily most of the ride was downhill. However, at a couple of points along the ride back I got this terrible cramp in the vastus medialis (inner thigh) of my right quadriceps. I had to unclip from my pedals and stick my leg out to the side because I couldn't bend, let along pedal, with it. So i used my left leg to pedal when all of a sudden the left vastus medialis cramped up as well. So here I am coasting down the highway with both legs sticking out to the side because of this cramp. I eventually was able to work both legs out of the cramp and keep going. About ten minutes after that my entire left quad cramped up. I've had cramps before but not to this extent. It was quite painful. I eventually made it back to the jeep to rest.
Unfortunately after the trip I set my camera on top of my jeep while I was putting the bikes up and everything away. Well that lapse of judgment caused me to forget my camera while I drove away with it still on top of the jeep. Needless to say I lost my camera with all of the pictures I took of that trip. The next day I went out and bought a new camera for the next trips.
After the trail we went to a local brewery where they make an awesome pizza and great home brewed root beer (sasparilla). It is better than A&W's root beer. It kinda reminded me of the root beer barrel candies.
Gibson Jack Trail
Gibson Jack MountainThis trail starts at the same trail head as the previous one and ends up going down the same canyon but instead of circumventing the mountain it goes straight up the mountain. Now this trail happens to be a little more difficult, nay, a lot more difficult than the previous one. In fact much of the uphill is not bikeable. There are times where the trail plateaus out a little bit but then heads right back up. At some points the trail goes up at a 45 degree angle and is very, very rocky. We passed a couple of guys coming down while we were heading up and both of them said that the trail was difficult but ridable. Both lied to us. It was not a biking trail . We ended up pushing our bikes up the majority of the trail and riding and rode a few times on the level parts. Getting to the peak made it all worth it though. The scenery was beautiful and green. We even found snow up at the peak and played in that for a little bit. The trail leading off the mountain eventually ends up in the same canyon as the previous trail I mentioned for another fun time of down hilling. At one point I took another beautiful spill. Parts of the trail is gully like so one wrong move and your tires end up scraping the side and coming out from under you. That's what happened to me. I jumped over this root in the trail and both tires started scraping along the the left wall of the trail. That sent me down (still clipped in) and I went crashing through the brush on my left side. My buddy behind me couldn't help from laughing as he rode behind me and just watched through the dust. He himself took a spill as well while I was riding behind him, not as graceful, but still funny. The video below is at a point just below the peak. It is an amazing view. Even though the majority of the uphill trail was unbikeable, it was still worth pushing the bikes up for these views and also for the downhill ride. This ride took us around four hours to complete.
The Mountain Peak
The Decent Down
This is a map of the three trails that I've been on recently that are found in Caribou National Forrest
On Saturday a friend and I took his '67 Toyota Land Cruiser out in the mountain to scout a bike trail that I've been mapping out for the upcoming holiday. It's a fairly long trail and climbs up a mountain so we decided to check it out to see if the first, and most difficult, part was ridable. We climbed the mountain with the Land Cruiser and decided that it would be too difficult to bike up. However, since we were at the top of the mountain we decided to explore some four wheeling tracks. I had a general understanding of where we would be going because of maps and google earth so we felt pretty comfortable exploring around. Going down the backside of the mountain was a little more difficult than we could've planned. We came to this one spot on the trail where the decent was around a 60 - 70 degree drop, loose gravel, a narrow trail, and a long, long roll down the hill on both sides if we were to screw up. We had no choice but to go down because there was no room to turn back around. As we headed down and the backend started to fishtail we both had the though of impending doom in the front of our minds. We made it down unscathed and continued along the trail. The rest of the trail was less techinical and not as dangerous. We finaly came to a fork in the trail and had to make a decision on which to travel. I knew that the left would take us safely back to a paved road , while I right one, well I had no clue on the right one. We decided to take Robert Frost's advice and "take the one less traveled," (the right). We putted along and enjoyed the decent of the trail. After a while we came to the final decent. From the top we could see the end and the road. The final decent couldn't have been more than 200-300 ft and didn't look as dangerous as the first part we came down, but still looked like it had it's risks. However, this time we had a choice to turn around if needed. We both questioned if we should attempt the risk with the end in clear sight, or double back to the safer trail which would take significantly more time. As we stood at the top estimating the risks vs benefits I was reminded how many times we were faced with these kinds of decisions in our spiritual lives. How many times can we see "the end (goal)" in sight and rush down the quicker, and possibly more dangerous, path? When faced with these decisions how often do we listen to that initial prompting of "turn back"? Even though we judged that final decent less dangerous than the first we decided to double back to that fork in the road and take the safer route. That increased our time spent getting back by 45 minutes because we had to climb back up the mountain and circumvent around it. We both felt both felt more comfortable with the decision that we made. Sometimes in our lives we don't have a choice to avoid the danger and must continue on but there will be many more times where we will have to make the choice of "risking it" or "double backing".
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