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with yesterday's adventure in Forest Park, today Jeff and I teamed up with former brother in the lore and mountain biking fiend Chris Sautter to hit the park again, but this time on mountain bikes. We met up at Fat Tire Farm and huffed and puffed up Holman Lane. Holman is not only steep, but fairly waterlogged in parts, which when paired with lousy mud tires (like mine) makes it quite an effort just to keep moving forward.

The asphalt of NW 53rd was a welcome change, which we rode until turning right to drop down Firelane 1.
Here are Chris and Jeff all nice and clean before riding down FL 1.

The descent was fast, fun and swoopy. The slog on Leif Erikson to Saltzman was cold, slow, muddy and slushy. Not much of the snow accumulation on Saltzman had melted since yesterday, so there was a bit of hike-a-biking going on. After reaching the top, we decided that we'd all had enough of frozen slushy mud, so we rode Skyline back towards town with the intent of heading down some legal, urban singletrack. However... a cable was down on the Radio Tower at the Barnes/Skyline intersection and Skyline and Barnes were both closed to all traffic. We tried to navigate through via the cemetery but that didn't work either, so we bombed down Burnside and turned into Washington Park to search for a trail down into town. Chris knew of one, but we couldn't find it, and after a short bushwack we gave up and took the pavement down to town.

Chris peeled off by PSU to head back up Terwilliger to home, while Jeff and I high-tailed it to home in SE, tired, cold and hungry. 29 miles, 2 hours and 45 minutes, and a whole lot of fun.

Greg