Jasper- BC BIKE RACE

A couple weeks back in your hometown can do a person alot of good. The riding in Jasper is soooo good. Endless flowing trails, a couple solid road rides, a few mtn lookouts and a great homegrown bikeshop in Freewheel Cycle. The boys (& girls) down there love to ride and fix bikes and talk bikes and do everything else imaginable concerning bikes. They know where to ride and have some solid group rides going out during the week. Its a great way to meet the locals and discover there trails!

After a solid week of training after the Test, my body was gettin rundown. Thats where having a stellar boss comes into play. “Hey Cory, want to go work for 2 days cutting some seismic line, do it whenever fits into your biking schedule, I’ll make it worth your while $$.”

Done. Getting some redneck time in quading through mudholes and cutting dead trees off the trail was a perfect mental break away from the bike. And it even fills the bank account which is an added bonus.
It wasn’t all peaches & cherries though as working seismic in the summer time after a month of rain can be horrendous. After getting the quad stuck, engine deep, in the first 15 minutes of work we switched over to an Argo. Argo’s are pretty stellar as they can rip through anything. We were cruising along till the engine overheated, so we hiked back to the quad, got it unstuck and went forward with that until we came to the conclusion that quading through km’s of mudholes gets old fast, and it isn’t very fast. So we went back to the Argo.

Things were going great until we came around a corner but instead of making the corner drove straight into the forest and hit a tree as the hydraulic steering lost pressure. We played with this for a while then went back to the quad once we got tired of running into trees. The quad worked for a while, then got really stuck, without any trees around to winch too, so we started hiking. This worked just fine. Eventually we needed to get the quad out so brought up the poorly steerring Argo and pulled the quad out with it. With just one seismic line left to cut we used the quad to get as far as possible then hiked. It was a gongshow but the work got done on time and everyone went home happy.

Home from work it was time for some more stellar rides in Jasper, one doing intervals up to the Palisades lookout, and the other, a road ride to Medicine lake to see it overflowing for the first time in 20 years. Pretty cool sight for anyone that knows the area.

My two weeks up in Jasper is coming to an end, but its only going to get better as I’ll be joing the rest of the Kona crew down in Vancouver tonight to kickoff the BC Bike Race!
A full week of west coast singletrack!

PS Thanks Ronald Worobec for the sweet pictures on the Valley of the 5 Trail!