Sunday, January 25, 2009

A fountain of riding goodness

It may look like I'm about to ride off the edge here but this is one of the complete log rides I pulled off.

This is partially the way every weekend should be. Saturday and Sunday mornings were both spent on the mountain bike. Love it.

Balancing before the fall. I love these things!

Today Adam and I headed down to Fountain Head park down in Fairfax Station, VA; my first time riding there. We skipped down 295 and onto 95 for the longish drive and ended up hitting the park sometime a bit before 10. Hitting the trail at first I was completely shocked by the rootiness of it. I started bombing down the hill and before I knew it felt like I was loosing it all over the place. I managed to get a grip and got used to it pretty quickly.

The skinny totter flattened out.

The park offered a bit more climbing then Rosaryville, nothing too serious but enough to get the breath moving. After the entry roller coaster trail we came out to a pretty sweet little play area in a "valley" opening. There are two teeter totters and a decent long and straight log-ride along with a bit of a busted picnic table and such. The teeters were the first I'd ever seen or tried and with a couple of tries we both completed the log ride.

Pretending to pull off a jump.

Through out the rest of the park the trails remained pretty technical but completely fun. Cleaning some of the more difficult areas feels great and really working over some of the technical features and short steep climbs is a great change up from the flowing smooth Rosaryville trails. Never really seen trails marked as well as those in Fountain Head either which was great. Rosaryville doesn't really need much signage while at Patapsco it would just be impossible.

Adam riding the drop.

In the exiting section of rollers I did some attempts on a side entry log ride but couldn't quite get the rear wheel up on it. At some point I'll have to get out and just spend some time on the log rides; I know the handling skills from that would greatly benefit my riding abilities. As I told Adam today, I think I'm lacking a bit in the technical skills category, I tend to just try and muscle my way through the technical stuff. Good for a bit but probably at the expense of endurance and it won't work on everything.

Leveling it out.

Afterwards a couple of burgers and some fries was the perfect ending to another great ride.

Up the teeter.

1 comment:

Darren said...

Glad you made it out, will have to ride with ya on the new steed. If not racing up for riding this weekend.