The climb to the TOP.

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Last night I was out at an event that celebrates the union of two people. As great as the evening was, I was thinking of my riding and how it suffered due to the pressures of work and the kid sport activities. I then realized that if I make it home I should go for a ride tomorrow.

I awake and contemplate where to ride, I mentally go through my catalog of rides that are left after the fire, and even though my riding has been limited, nothing got me motivated. At this point I looked at my bikes for some inspiration, next thing I’m doing is changing out my wheels for road wheels! Yes, people! Road wheels!

So I venture off into the concrete jungle and with no plan of where to go then I spot Santa Anita Ave. (Chantry Flat Rd./Winter Creek for you Dirt Junkies) in the corner of my eye. I try my best to stay off the roads of death and make my way to Santa Anita Ave.

I start making my way up and I start to feel at home with spinning wheels against gravity, I stop for a moment of silence for Mr. Squirrel. I get to the gate and surprisingly it is open to public traffic (need to plan a Winter Creek ride soon), so I keep spinning and a big grin comes on to my face. I feel at home in the hills, dirt or asphalt it felt good to be there and smell the Manzanita and other shrubs our mountains grow. Unfortunately, Stoner only made it to the main turn off that overlooks the SGV, memories were stirred, I’ve been busted by cops, had countless dates and many other blurry memories I dare not mention on the site.

After some time of enjoying my impromptu quest, a song came on the headphones – “Vapor Trail” by The Crystal Method, which was my ticket to ride. Now the next best thing to MTBing, is descending winding roads on an MTB with street tires, pushing corners at 30mph at 45 degree angles is some serious shite. Around the last turn I had to brake hard, two deer standing in the road on purpose blocking me and giving me looks like “what holmes, you wants us to move? This is our barrio.”. Then came the half mile long 40mph descent of Santa Anita – scary, but a rush none the less.

Then I made my way home.

– Stoner

There must be free time in the air. The site’s changed again. While working on the MWBA gallery, one thing led to another and pmbc.org needed some much needed cleaning up. I’ve added a new look to the site and the gallery. It’s only a face lift, and no content has changed. However, the gallery uses a new URL Rewrite engine, so old links to albums and pictures will no longer work. They now have an index.php crammed in the middle of the URL.

Special thanks to Pete Mauro for the fantastic shot I used for the site banner. If there’s anything that’s broken here or at MWBA, please let me know. Firefox users, on the Mac at least, may notice that some of the small fonts are difficult to read. That’s a font smoothing issue with Firefox that I have yet to figure out.

So, our Umpteenth Annual Pilgrimage to Mammoth is now over and we’ve all gone back to our regular lives. Some of us are already Jonesing for the next trip but all of us that went will agree that it was awesome. No rain whatsoever, temps in the 70’s except at the top and super blue skies that you’ll see in the pics.

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Santa Ana River Trail (SART)
It started out with a small eager group which turned out to be a good thing (Je-Roam, King Taco, V, Mitch and myself). As we started the trail, it started to tell the story of what we were in for. Nice hard pack (no powder or sand here) and up and down rolling single track! The trail did have a lot of corners that were very narrow and exposed but after about the 15th corner we were all hitting them at normal speed. Ridding these trails through meadows and pine tree filled forest was the biggest treat considering what we normally ride. Every so often you come around a corner and see this grand view of the San Gorgonio valley. The trail was easy to follow and through all the adrenaline rush we ended up doing the grand loop which kicked my arse the last 1/4 mile.
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