https://www.instagram.com/p/BM-aOdigtXB/
Tag: <span>Lebanon Hills</span>
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJiRKNaA8pW/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGcRZHXLdQY/
Another view of it:
Mid-November here in Minnesota is a good time of year to try riding some MTB obstacles that I’ve been avoiding. Why? It’s not too hot to armor up completely and I have all winter to heal should my lack of skill make me pay a price.
1. Riding down the big rock at the end of the wooden bridge in the X loop of the Lebanon Hills Mountain Bike Trail. It’s a steep drop, made trickier because the landing is the bridge over a 4-foot culvert with some rocks down below. I rode it just as it started to rain. It took me 4 attempts to clean it. 20-second vid:
Last Saturday was IMBA’s Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day (#TKMBD). I’m on the board of CROCT and we got a late start on planning activities for it. But rather than doing nothing, we decided at almost the last minute to invite CROCT members to meet at MORC’s Lebanon Hills Mountain Bike Trail where Dakota County was hosting its annual Wild Ride Mountain Bike Festival.
We had 5 kids and 4 adults show up and we all had a blast among the many hundreds of others who attended. We’ll be better organized for next year’s TKMBD!
See the album of15 photos and a 1-minute video on the CROCT blog post.
I managed to squeeze in some decent singletrack winter riding on my 29’er last week before the spring thaw hit. The trails were packed hard and the traction was amazing.
On Thursday afternoon, I rode everything at MORC’s Lebanon Hills MTB Park:
including my favorite rock in the skills park:
It was an all- MORC weekend. I rode Murphy-Hanrehan & Lebanon Hills by myself on Saturday. And then I rode Theodore Wirth and Elm Creek on Sunday with Chris Heineman and Mike Loerzel.
Can you tell that a certain someone was out of town?
I finally cleaned this log skinny both ways at Lebanon Hills Mountain Bike Trail yesterday. It turns out that the instructional series on ‘holding a line’ I’m doing for Thick Skull Mountain Bike Skills is actually benefiting the instructor. Whodathunkit?
55-second video:
In the past month or so, I’ve managed to go riding with guys 25-40 years younger than me. Yeah, that’s a bit of bragging as they’re all very good riders and I’m able to more or less keep up with them, which makes me feel younger.
But putting that ego stuff aside, it’s one of the things I really like about mountain biking as a geezer: I get to meet and participate in a recreational activity with a younger crowd that I don’t normally have much contact with.
Update October 28: I’ve added several more riders, with photos and videos. The list now includes AJ Peterson, Chris Knight, David Starrs, John Gaddo, Manny Paulino, Marty Larson, Michael Guinee, and Miguel Masberg.
I’d never heard of the term ‘pedal ratcheting’ as a mtb skill until recently when I noticed that it’s one of the skills covered in IMBA’s ICP Level 2 course. See it demonstrated at the 1:18 mark of this video by ICP’s Lead Instructor Trainer Shaums March.
Pedal ratcheting turned out to be helpful last week in two instances. The first was when I was attempting to ride this multiple rock/elevated boardwalk skinny in the skills park at the Lebanon Hills MTB Trail system. I was on my 29’er, trying to get through in the opposite direction from normal (more difficult) without a rear wheel hop: