I am a lazy bastard

I took off monday (labor day), I didn’t do squat on Tuesday, and I took off Friday to ride up Rollins Pass with Sarah. Long story short, not much got done on the bike building front this week. C’est la vie. The weather looks to be bad today and tomorrow, so I’m hoping to get motivating to make small steel tubes into larger conglomerations of steel tubes.

So, a few pictures from this weekend’s activities. First up, I have been canning like mad – there are TONS of fruit trees in Boulder (mainly apple) which have their fruit just go to waste every year – my father in law probably lets 300 pounds of apples rot on his lawn every autumn. So Sarah and I picked a ton of apples (and got some peaches from Westminster, too) and I made some peach preserves, as well as a ton of applesauce. Here’s a shot of the radioactive-looking peaches cooking up. I was amazed at how much sugar you have to use – 5 cups for every 4 cups of chopped peaches! Wow! Next time I’ll get the non-sugar type of pectin and try to make something a tiny bit healthier.

On friday, Sarah and I rode up Rollins pass with a couple of other folks from the CU biochemistry dept (they were having a retreat over the pass in Winter Park). I turned around at the pass and rode back to Boulder. Long story short: 8 hours, ~8,000 feet of climbing, ~70 miles. I was so cooked when I got back to Ned that I decided to just bomb down the canyon instead of trying to ride trails back. Sheesh. The picture is from just above the top of Corona lift at Eldora – there’s actually a sweet singletrack way to get up the pass if you take this ridge due west.

I was totally spent, but since I was playing bachelor for the weekend, Miguel insiste d that we party. Here I am riding the MIFA on our way out to the bars after consuming a lot of vodka and pomegranate juice. Yuck. At least you get blitzed quick…

Finally, I went downhilling with Feldy yesterday. We got in 5 runs before exhaustion forced us to quit – riding technical downhill trails when you’re tired is not a great idea. I accomplished a couple of minor goals – hit the big ~20′ tabletop on the old DH course (TNT) cleanly for the first time, and also worked up the guts to hit the biggest set of tables at the bottom near the lift, though I only managed to cleanly land on the tranny on the first and second jumps of the set. The WB DH-2/Groove fork is awesome – I was getting the full 7″ of travel, which combined with the big wheels makes me a better DH rider than I really am.

I even got a few comments on the 29″ DH bike, though fewer than I’d expect. I guess people just don’t look that closely at bikes, because I would tend to think mine would stand out (steel, 29″ wheels, big gold “Waltworks” decals) as something noteworthy. Maybe I should have powdercoated it neon green or something. Keystone is open for one more weekend, so maybe I’ll try to drag Sarah up there one more time before the season ends.