Tag Archives: bikes

the weather forecast clearly stated heavy downpours all week. when you get a downpour in vancouver, it isn’t like the ones in the uk. british rain trickles down. after displacing all it’s pent up energy with a 20 minute barrage, it loses steam and becomes that ‘wet air’ type brits will be familiar with. in vancouver it can sustain the barrage and it can sustain it for as long as it wants, no let up, no breaks, waterfalls from the sky.

so when i woke on tuesday morning to see that it wasn’t raining, i google mapped the route out to mount fromme and set off. first time on a bike in over a month – city riding scares me. google maps said it was 20km from kitsilano to fromme and should take over an hour. my fitness levels dictated that it took easily 2.

once out of the city and ascending the mountain highway it began to feel worth it. at one point i did some kind of double take that i was actually about to ride this place. i’d been warned by project-b to take it easy to begin with, advice i was taking very seriously.

floppy bunny is one of the first trails you come to heading up the forest track. it seemed a nice place to start. it was now raining heavily as forecast but these trails ride so well still. even the wood sections feel grippy compared to the slickwood of north shore stuff back home. floppy bunny provided a nice intro to what the riding is like with loads of roots and rocks, my favourite stuff to ride. after that first, short blast the 20km ride there felt like a worthy amount of effort.

it gets pretty eerie up here when you’re alone. clouds of condensation fall fast and surround you like in a horror film. trail features are dotted throughout the forest if you look closely, it’s like an ewok village.

the building of the trails is of such high quality. this wall ride is on a blue/green trail – in dalby blue/green trails are for walkers and people with limited bike skills, if you put this in there you’d be airlifting people off it daily.

as i climbed higher up the highway the weather was increasingly bad, there was an inch of snow and slush on the ground and a mountain rescue worker told me the higher up you go the worse the slush would be. he recommended oilcan, which was still pretty snowy to begin with but rode nicely still. by this point though water was literally flowing down the track, the reason for the north shore style of wooden bridges and crossings.

in total i rode five trails: floppy bunny, bobsled, lower oilcan, lower crippler and the double black graded digger. digger was perhaps a bit ambitious for a first day and provided some interesting and embarrassing bike-ditching.

that was my first day. i dropped off lower crippler into a graffitied park and headed for the seabus back to kits.

i like the north shore, i think me and it will get on very well.