Back from VT!

Dawn and I just got back from Vermont, we spent four great days up there riding - 3 days at Kingdom Trails and one at Millstone. Both places were great, Millstone is a lot like the riding around here in CT - a lot of rocks and technical riding. Kingdom Trails is a lot more smooth and flowy. There is nothing in the world like cruising down a twisty trail through the woods at mach stupid speeds. The way the KT trails are laid out you can do that A LOT!

During the four days of riding Dawn and I rode about 50 miles, I did another 25 or so on my own. I hate having the camera steal away from the "real" moments on the trail, so we didn't take a lot of pictures. I have quite a bit of video and will put together a music video using some music from Plato's Cave (a band I was in 20+ years ago!).

This is a classic photo op at Kingdom Trails - in front of a sugar house. If you go here later in the year (or early Spring) you will see a spider web of tubing leading to the sugar house.

Dawn rolling down a nice section of singletrack trail.

I went out on solo rides a couple of the afternoons we were there - I got lucky on one ride (though that luck came with a good soaking from some rain) and caught a nice rainbow:

On that same ride I came around a corner and scared a black bear that was walking down the trail - I am no expert, but I think he was a young adult - he was probably about 100 pounds. He scooted up a tree that was less than 15 feet from me. At first I thought "how cool!" and grabbed my phone to take a picture.

It was far less cool when the bear heard the shutter noise and he dropped back down out of the tree keeping an eye on me. I was off my bike and terrified that he was contemplating a run at me. I had no idea what to do. I said aloud "I felt a lot better when you were up in that tree" and the bear turned his head and ran full speed down the hill away from the trail. Whew. I had a million thoughts running through my head, I had always heard that black bears were more afraid of us than we are of them, that was DEFINITELY the case!

During this trip I was reminded just how lucky Dawn and I are to share a passion for mountain biking. How great is it that we get to spend this time together doing something we love and getting to see all these great things in the woods?

KT is a well established mountain bike destination - the town of East Burke sees over 50,000 visitors per year just to ride their trails. Millstone is about an hour away from East Burke - I can see that they are trying to make Millstone into a similar destination for mountain biking - right now there are about 35(?) miles of really nice trails but the infrastructure just isn't there yet to make it a destination. It is a very cool area built around what used to be a granite quarry - there is rusting machinery, huge (I mean HUGE) piles of granite chunks and various other gear from the quarrying industry - it must have been quite the site back when it was active.

One of the many quarries we passed along the way: