Wow, it is the end of April already! Time just flies by when you are slaving away at a job. The depressing part of all this is that it has only just become dry enough to start riding!

I lost a few good weeks of riding to an endless supply of rain. Most of the trails I enjoy riding are just no fun when wet. Ravensburg in particular tends to flood during early spring. The other major factor in this slow start is that my local ride spot, WMWA, is not open for mountain biking until mid May. Once that opens, I can begin my after work rides :-)

Anyway, This past weekend marked the first "real" ride weekend of the season. It was an amazing weekend for riding, as it was in the 70s all week long. This dried all of the trails out, making for perfect conditions. To mark the occasion I took a three day weekend.

On Friday, I had to decide between riding at Blue Marsh, or French Creek. This is always an extremely difficult decision to make. I decided to do the West Loop at Blue Marsh, mostly because I didn't want to get to tired on day one. As I mentioned earlier, the conditions were PERFECT!

The highlight of the ride had to be when I almost fell off a cliff into the lake. Yeah, Seriously, I almost fell into the god damn lake! I was doing an easy climb that had a cliff on the right side. Well, it was more like a 30ft extremely extremely steep slope down to the lake, but lets just say cliff. The trail was quite wide, so there is no reason I should even have to worry about falling off the side.

Of course, being me, I choose to ride as close to the drop off as possible! Why? The hell if I know, it just seemed smoother! As I said, I was just spinning up the hill when all of a sudden, for absolutely no reason, I just got off balance. Well what did I do? I tried to put my right foot down.

Yes, I am this stupid.. I tried to put my foot down on the nonexistent ground. About half way though this idiotic maneuver, I came to the conclusion that I was a moron. I quickly tried to correct the fall to the left side, but that never works. I panicked and fell half way down this damn cliff, and somehow stopped myself before I hit the lake. I also got lucky in that my bike didn't do the slow tumble into the disgusting water of Blue Marsh.

Anyway.. The rest of the ride went perfectly ;-)

Fast Forward to Saturday, I met up with Rob and we did the AWESOME trails at Swatara State Park. The trails were also in excellent shape, and were really fast. We did all of the different loops in a sort of random fashion, it made for a great ride. Rob was having some difficulties with his dumb ass lungs, but I think he is going to be upgrading to a newer model before any future rides. It was just an awesome day for a ride.

I HIGHLY recommend the Swatara Trail system. The trails are very well designed, and purpose built for mountain biking. They aren't technical, but instead are fast and flowy. It is just a fun diversion from the traditional PA "rock slug-fest"

Oh well, another week, another ride (or more!)

Ride On!