April Fool’s Day saw me up early for my first full day tour for the 2014 season. To my surprise I awoke to a fresh coating of snow in the yard, as well as snow still falling (it’s been more than a month since we woke up to snow in town). So I get ready, checking my guide pack to make sure all the essentials are there, then I head out to Nancy P’s the local bakery that supplies all of our sandwiches and grab a bag of delicious food that we ail get to enjoy a little later in the day. I am the first one to the office this morning (since there is fresh snow at Mt. Bachelor everyone opted to ride this morning) so I start the day by clearing the snow off of the porch and stairs to the office, a first for me in my time guiding. Once I have finished snow removal, I get some snacks together and fill up water bottles for the three guests I will be riding with today. Then I check their rental bikes out and get the van we will be using warned up and ready to go. It’s nice to be getting back into guiding so early, last season it was the middle of May until I started guiding so it’s nice to be available and able to get out already. Right around 9:00 a.m. all three guests arrive, we introduce ourselves and talk about what we will need before heading out for the day. Pedals are put onto bikes and and helmets and gloves are dispersed, then we start loading bikes and gear into the van and head out into the snowy morning. New hop on highway 20 and head west towards Tumalo, then turn and head north on Cline Falls Highway towards the Maston riding area, which is a great place to get your legs and lungs tuned up.
After we unload, we all do the parking lot test to make sure are bikes are ready for the miles of single-track that are waiting for us to explore, once everyone is situated, we roll out, heading east from Juniper trail-head. We meander through the outer loop of this riding area for awhile, before entering into the center ring and then moving in the direction of the canyon where some of the best views of the Deschutes River can be seen, as well as some of the most fun parts of the riding area are. You couldn’t ask for better conditions, the snow wasn’t sticking to the trails and everything was damp and tacky, and once you got going, it wasn’t too cold.
(Tom and I posing along the canyon rim)
After a 2 hour loop at Maston we headed back to the Juniper trail-head to load up and head to a different riding spot. Horse Butte is another “desert” riding spot that is popular in the early riding season when snow has the main trail networks either buried in snow or too wet and muddy to ride without causing damage to the trails. So we eat our lunch on the road and head south east. Much to our surprise the snow had accumulated much more at Horse Butte than it did in town or at Maston, but everyone was in good spirits and we decided to see what a snowy ride would be like today. Joe, Ian, and Tom were all troopers down for whatever I could deliver, we road out into the snow, I was breaking fresh tracks for us as we slogged into the buried single-track before us. We made it about a mile and a half before we decided that this may be more of and endeavor than we wanted today.
(Ian, Tom, and Joe taking a breather as we worked our way back out of the snowy trails we found at Horse Butte)
When we got back to the van we still had about an hour of riding to make it a full day tour, and I didn’t want to let these guys down, since they are all first time visitors to Bend and first time clients for Cog Wild, so I decided to give them a little tour of some of the trails along the river in town. We parked at Drake Park and rode along the river down through the Old Mill and then through Farewell Bend Park and onto the Deschutes River trail for a little bit more dirt under our tires, luckily the river provides so many beautiful views that none of the the guys seemed to feel disappointed by the decision to finish our ride here.
My Mountain Bike Life... 