Here's Little E and dealer arriving at the trails, and my machine at the trailhead sign.
Another pic, this time it's me in the middle. (That's a bad visual.)
Now on to the good stuff, the trails of CB:
I promise you'll get sick of seeing pic's of my bike posing. Tough shit, get over it, you're just jealous.
OK, about the riding and trip funnies. For a flatlander the pitch is incredible, even when things look relatively flat you just ease off the brakes and bam, it's 25-30 mph. The trail named "Painter Boy" is freakin' unreal. Ungodly high speeds on a sinewy singletrack, ripping past the aspens and nailing a small rock garden at terminal velocity is my kinda bike love. The big question I have though is how long do you have to hang out at altitude until you feel normal? I never could breathe when trying any climbing in the thin air up there. Every effort left me with the feeling that I was going to get an unobstructed view of my lunch. Speaking of lunch viewings, drinking at altitude or having not drank competitively in years led to a serious mistake on day two in CB. You see, they sell these things called pitchers of margarita's for like $15, that's the cheapest deal in town. So myself, Little E, and Dealer all had a pitcher with dinner then headed to a quaint little bar that had shots for like $2 each. So let's see, we had a few beers, a pitcher of marg.'s, and then did some tequila shots! OUCH! I was handling the tequila just fine but somehow a shot of goldschlager (sp?) got on the table, and in the shot frenzy it somehow got in my belly. Goodnight Irene! My party was over at 9:00 p.m., I hadn't done that in years. But it's the lunch thats funny and the viewing was done by Little E; he had ruined the bathroom earlier in the evening if you know what I'm talking about then had a little too much to drink himself. He went to the loo to rid himself of the poisons and was coherent enough to remember that the porcelain should be off limits but in the melee started to heave which made the spew go on the walls, the urinal, the floor, the fucking everything. Unlike me, he puked and rallied while I was being taken to the condo by our DD Whistler. (Thanks David.) The tag line of the trip came from Justin's episode and will stick with us forever: "It's called the puke and spin, c'mon man everyone's doing it!" NICE. Needless to say, the riding the next day was a little tamer; hell it's hard to hold onto the bars when your hands are trembling.
FYI, don't drive back to T-Town from this area via Salina, KS no matter what Google maps, Yahoo maps, or Mapquest say. They'll tell you it's about 13 hours, it took us about 12 to get to Gunny so we thought we'd take the other way home to see some different sights and that was a huge 16 hour mistake. Great trip, shitty drive back. From Colorado Springs to Salina has to be the straightest, flattest road in the world. It'll have you contemplating suicide before that drives over.
