Thursday, March 19, 2009

Of Boojum and Bicycles

Back from the desert with all fingers and toes attached. Started the trip off with a Hueco crushing sesh with the Danimal into tequila sipping at secret radium hotsprings. Drove to San Diego for crew rendevous, then pushed the muff for about 700 miles from Ensenada to Loreto all detours included. With the additional "blue blazing", we made it from San Diego, California, United States of America to La Paz, Baja California, Sur, Mexico in 19 days. Highlights include our all day ride into 30 mph headwinds in the high desert plains, secluded beach camping with natural, tidal hotsprings, the start-up of Crusher Industries (look for the spring line-up "Photo-op One" to be dropping in department stores too soon), and new prophetic incarnations of the prophet boojum, who is not. who is. who. (insert elightenment).
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Monday, March 16, 2009

Middle Creek



A long slow drizzle that started late Friday the 13th and continued through Saturday only got a few creeks in the Chattanooga area up to a runnable level. Suck Creek got up to around 4.5' North Chick. Creek ran at a minimum flow, and many rivers on the plateau came up as well.
I met Jeremy at the takeout for Middle Creek to asses the level. The new gauge was reading 1' and we weren't sure if the creek would have enough water, but it is a thin margin between not enough water and too much. A coin toss determined that we would drop into the gorge... "best two out of three?" Just then Nick pulled up fired up about trying something new and with the nudge of his enthusiasm we headed up the mountain.
We hiked down past Rainbow Lake and stayed on the trail until we got past Rainbow Falls and proceeded down to the creek.



Every time I go in here I tell myself I am never going back. I tend to go back about once a year, I must forget. But after this trip I find myself not coming to that conclusion. Having enough flow and it being cleaned out minimized the portaging to only two mandatory portages due to wood. Next time I think we'd all like to bump it up as far as the water level goes, and with a little more work with a saw and another motivated but small group I'd go in again.



The run is about a mile long and drops around 700+ feet. I think we managed to run just about every runnable drop amongst our crew. There were probably 2 others out there that would go but you'd have to take the hit, and someone else has already taken the hit for that glory.



I am not going to provide any sort of river description other than to say its steep and dangerous; full of sieves and undercuts. In fact just to give an example there is water flowing down stream to the entrance of "shoot me in the face with a 9" that is coming across the top of some boulders which pours into the rocks at the runnable line, below those boulder is a pool (fed by a sieve above) with a falls that falls into the back of one of the caves near the landing of the first drop, this falls actually falls back under the flow going towards the entrance. If that description doesn't make sense it is because the structure of the rapids and sieves that create them often don't make sense.















Sierra Slide



First Decent of the center line of "Dirty Willy"- Nick M.




Superman Slide is a full on chargefest. There are two drops that make up the entrance that are still unrun and remain there for the taking... its only your face...

tighter than the picture makes it look.

A little more boogy gets you to Craze Maze. The top drop has been run before, this trip was the first descent of the second drop, the third portion of the drop, which consists of a three drop series and is really the best part, has been run but was portaged due to bad wood.



Setting Safety to avoid a 25 foot drop into a sieve:





Tuesday, March 10, 2009


Andy D is riding in Mexico- check his progress here: crazyguyonabike

We got some rain and got to go kayaking in Alabama, saw lots of friends paddled a few river miles, good times, no photos, no video.

A great cyclist was lost in Chattanooga, our deepest sympathy goes out to David's family. Below are several links to check out on this:
Chattanoogan
Suck Creek Cycle Blog
Suck Creek Cycle Blog more
Drunk Cyclist: Rider Down

Our boys at LVM did a feature on squirt boating on their "monday morning mad house" series and the video featured some TJ action, watch the video here:
Lunch Video
check out their other stuff on the link to the left.

Got a report back from the annual march get together, which I was bummed to miss this year, that there was good water and nice weather for a green run and heartbreak ridge ride. It was also reported that "the big game hunter" now has a bike. Look out fat bottomed girls!



Stay bright, be seen and crack a cold one.