A visit to the old haunts

The last week of July found our family all together in Reno, NV for my sister's wedding. I grew up in Reno, living there from 1980 - 2005 minus six years while I was in the Navy. I'll always love Reno especially given the plethora of recreation options, my favorites being biking and snowboarding.

Monday (July 30th) I was able to get together with one of my best friends, Ken, for a ride up Keystone Canyon. Ken and I started biking at about the same time. We both started out mountain biking and didn't get into any serious road riding until much later. Over the years we've accumulated a proverbial butt-ton of great stories riding together. Most involve something bad happening to Ken or something stupid happening to me.

A couple of quick examples before continuing... One of our first mountain biking trips was to Mammoth Mountain a few hours south of Reno. (Cue sound of angels singing) Mammoth has some of the best riding (both mtn biking and snowboarding) I have ever seen. Miles and miles of singletrack await and even better you can take the lift up and ride down which is great since the summit is at an oxygen deprived 11,000+ ft.

We timed out trip to coincide with the NORBA championships which at the time were held at Mammoth every year. The first day we got to see all the greats of that time including Ned Overend and Julie Furtado. At the bottom of the run they came down a short but pretty technical section that was followed by a little rise. Ken was explaining to me how it really wasn't that big a deal just let it flow through the technical bunny hop off the little rise and off you go. I had never seen Ken bunny hop anything prior to this trip so I challenged him to give me a demonstration. One thing you need to know at this point is that if you tell Ken he CAN'T do something he will do one of two things:

A. Do it and prove you wrong
B. Hurt himself in the process of trying to prove you wrong

In this case it was a combination of the two. He nailed the technical section, completed the bunnyhop, but landed off balance and veered off the trail into a section of fencing laying of to the side. Luckily the injuries weren't too serious and we were able to ride the infamous Kamikaze trail the next day where I did an endo and landed on my head (thank goodness for helmets).

Another time we decided to rent full suspension bikes to see what they were all about and take them up to Squaw Valley for a day of fun. Upon reaching the top of the mountain, as is usually the case, we immediately missed one of our turns and ended up in some pretty gnarly terrain. Ken took off ahead of me and made it all of a quarter of a mile before I looked up and found him rolling around in pain on the side of the trail. A ditch (he later referred to it as a small waterbar but trust me it was a ditch) ran right across the trail and he though he could let the suspension absorb it. This in the day when 2" of rear travel was great. Despite the intense pain he wanted to ride his bike back down. Fortunately the front tire was extremely tacoed. So the Squaw Valley staff brought him down on a quad while I rode down. Then we got in the car, drove to Tahoe City, returned the bikes (he had to pay for the tacoed tire as well), drove back to Reno and straight to Washoe Medical Center. Nothing major... just a punctured lung and broken collar bone.

But I digress, back to the current story... Ken picked me up at 7:15ish and we headed off to Keystone Canyon parking in a nearby subdivision. I immediately realized I had already committed my stupid act for the ride when I went to put my riding shoes on and found in my rush to get out of our rental house I had grabbed one riding shoe and one of my brother's sandals. Great... Luckily I was using Ken's wifes bike and it had pedals with wide platforms around the cleats so I would be able to get by with tennis shoes. Ken was also riding a full suspension he borrowed from a friend of his.

I have to admit I was pretty worried about this ride. As is the case with most rides around Reno, Keystone is almost non-stop uphill until you turn around and come back down. Plus we were starting at roughly 3700' higher than here in IL. But I figured I could probably hang and if nothing else now I can blame any substandard performance on my lack of proper shoes.

So off we went. Keystone was a bigger blast than ever. It was a great day for riding and it was great to ride with Ken and catch up on what was going on in Reno. We had barely started when we came across a pickup truck rolled onto its side. A notice from the local police dept. indicated it had been stolen and driven down the canyon until they rolled it.

The bottom part of the canyon wasn't too bad. It's not too steep and except for a couple of short technical sections that I've ALWAYS had problems with I was doing pretty good. Then we got past the radio towers and into some of the real climbing. It was like someone had sucked every atom of oxygen out of the atmosphere. My heart was pounding, my ears were pounding, and despite the fact I was breathing in 76 Liters of air with each breath I was light headed. I'm sure my hear rate was 185+. Knowing Ken always wears his heart rate monitor I asked him at the top of this climb what his heat rate was. 150 he tells me. 150!!! I don't think he realized how close he was to being hit over the head with a rock and left to die in the desert at that point!

But soon we got to the section of very tasty downhill singletrack towards some old mine tailings. It was a blast and I was really starting to like the Marin full suspension I was on. After the downhill it was one more lung busting climb up a fireroad to the pond that is our official rest / turnaround point for the ride. The road was EXTREMELY dry and very loose powdery dirt. Traction was hard to come by and right before the pond it gets really steep. More dizziness and heart pounding ensued but finally we made the pond. Some type of large bird (heron maybe) was flying around the pond as we crested the final section.

We headed over to THE tree to catch our breath and take a breather before heading back down. As we were discussing how deep we thought the pond was Ken told me to take a look at my 11... er... 1 o'clock. I looked in that direction and there standing in the shade of a tree just a stone's throw away was one awesome buck. He had an 8 point rack and was just standing there looking at us. Ken called out and told him we weren't going to hurt him and, as if he understood, the buck walked out of the shadows down to the lake and started drinking and drinking and drinking (apparently he was thirsty). He then took a long look at us and slowly turned the other way and walked up and over the hill. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Having had our fill of wildlife we headed down the trail. Now I REALLY started to like the full suspension. Almost the entire ride back to the car is downhill. Let me say here I'll never be accused of being the fastest on any section of downhill, but with that full suspension, I felt like I was breaking the sound barrier the whole way down. Being able to just fly downhill and keep going downhill for literally miles is one of the great things I miss about Nevada.

As we descended the bottom portion of the trail, Ken decided to make the ride a complete success by performing a nice endo on a little technical drop. To further top it off he then got mad at the little drop and headed back up the trail so he could come back down the drop again this time cleaning it quite nicely.

All in all, it was a great day that made me really miss being able to ride virtually any type of terrain you want within minutes of Reno and even more so, being able to ride with a good friend like Ken. There are alot of things I love about riding, being able to challenge yourself to make it up that climb or clean that technical section... but riding with someone else who shares your love of cycling just makes it all that much better. Maybe that's why I haven't ridden since I got home... or maybe it's the 95 degrees w/ 90% humidity we've been having. Probably a combination of the two.

Note: I just read that two days after we rode Keystone a mountain lion was spotted in the lower reaches of the canyon. Story can be found here: http://dhreno.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/mountain-lion-sighted-in-keystone-canyon/