In this episode Josh & Dane are joined by Justin Dietrich (General Badass, Downhill Wizard, & O.G. Hydrofoil Pro) to chat about a few of the “destination worthy” trails they’ve ridden recently while on travel in Utah, California, and Northern Arizona.
While many trails are discussed throughout the episode this Trail Talk icenters around…
Portal - Mag 7 (Moab, UT)
https://www.blm.gov/visit/magnificent-seven-mag-7-trail-system
https://www.trailforks.com/region/mag-7-17329
Snow Valley & Snow Summit Bike Parks (Big Bear, CA)
https://www.bigbearmountainresort.com/mountain-biking
New: Bean Peaks (Prescott, AZ)
https://beanpeaks.prescottmtb.com/
https://www.trailforks.com/region/bean-peaks-64694
New: Full Sail & Classic: AZT San Francisco Peaks (Flagstaff, AZ)
https://www.trailforks.com/trails/full-sail-760575/
https://www.trailforks.com/trails/azt-san-francisco-peaks-16346/
Listen to Mountain Cog
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Other Podcast Sites
Socials
Instagram
Facebook
Email
mountaincog@gmail.com
In this episode Josh & Dane are joined by Justin Dietrich (General Badass, Downhill Wizard, & O.G. Hydrofoil Pro) to chat about a few of the “destination worthy” trails they’ve ridden recently while on travel in Utah, California, and Northern Arizona.
While many trails are discussed throughout the episode this Trail Talk icenters around…
Portal - Mag 7 (Moab, UT)
https://www.blm.gov/visit/magnificent-seven-mag-7-trail-system
https://www.trailforks.com/region/mag-7-17329
Snow Valley & Snow Summit Bike Parks (Big Bear, CA)
https://www.bigbearmountainresort.com/mountain-biking
New: Bean Peaks (Prescott, AZ)
https://beanpeaks.prescottmtb.com/
https://www.trailforks.com/region/bean-peaks-64694
New: Full Sail & Classic: AZT San Francisco Peaks (Flagstaff, AZ)
https://www.trailforks.com/trails/full-sail-760575/
https://www.trailforks.com/trails/azt-san-francisco-peaks-16346/
Listen to Mountain Cog
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Other Podcast Sites
Socials
Instagram
Facebook
Email
mountaincog@gmail.com
we are recording now.
Dane:Okay, it's live he, he recorded this intro music yeah, I remember hearing that yeah yeah go ahead, man.
Justin Dietrich:Let's hear it, let's hear a joke all right, that joke just came up actually. So everybody's keeps hearing about Carlos. Carlos was here at the shop. Everybody's leaving. We're closing sharp shop up. Notice Carlos's car still out front. So we're missing Carlos. So we go looking for Carlos and we find him. He's in the bathroom.
Josh:You know what he's doing. What was he doing? Talking shit. That might be the first original dad joke we've had like on the and like, like. Timing wise, it was like developed right now.
Dane:Yeah, like that, that happened we. He said that that today and I'm like you got to say that on the show. It's awesome.
Justin Dietrich:Yep, that one worked out right now, all right.
Josh:What the hell day is it? It's Wednesday, yep, yep, wednesday. Wednesday which, uh, the fins call little saturday. Who's the fins if the finnish people, oh, finna, okay, anyways, little saturday, little um I I call it hump day, right hump day. I don't know why there's gonna be a whole bunch of these like jokes between you two yeah we should probably tell our listeners who we got here with us. You want to introduce yourself, buddy?
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, I'm Justin Dietrich. I'm kind of a Guru Bikes ambassador, downhill racer for Guru Bikes and old friend of Dane's, and we met maybe I don't know eight years ago.
Dane:Why do you guys always bring up time? Then my age comes into it? I didn't know eight years ago. Why do you guys always bring up time? Then my age comes into it.
Justin Dietrich:I didn't bring up the age thing, I will say that we are similar in age only because we went to the same high school. You guys are similar in age. He looks way younger than you do, isn't that amazing?
Josh:I mean, I would have guessed you were 10, 15 years younger than him.
Justin Dietrich:I have no hair.
Josh:Okay, yeah.
Dane:I have no hair. Okay, yeah, he's hiding it under there. I don't have a hat on.
Justin Dietrich:I was blessed with a dark beard, so that helps.
Josh:Oh geez. All right, I have to start out by saying that I'm super intimidated because you guys are both like downhill shredders and I'm just like a mere mortal, like casual mountain bike rider.
Dane:You know you say that all the time, but if I don't have an e-bike I have a hard time keeping up with you.
Josh:So I appreciate that.
Dane:Yeah, so that's legit and if you'd go ride with us, we'll show you I've been riding. It's not that I haven't been riding.
Josh:I invite you to places and you are like, no, I'm scared, come ride portal with us. Screw you man, can we? Can we like then run? It's funny man.
Dane:I described trails all the time to people and I'm like, yeah, it's no problem, it's easy. Somebody came in the shop and they're like, yeah, that techie section at Honeybee. And I'm like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? And I go out there and you realize there are techie sections and people are coming into the shop and buying droppers, you know, so they can do the techie section at Honeybee and for those of you that don't live in Tucson, honeybee is a real, it's cow trails, super mellow.
Justin Dietrich:Dirt sidewalks, yeah, dirt sidewalks, as green as it gets, yeah sidewalks, yeah, dirt sidewalks, green as it gets, yeah, and.
Dane:But you'll come into this little wash area and there's a you know like half, half a foot drops here and there, like they're really small it's like going down a curb, you know for us and that freaks people out. So, but yeah, I, I forget that my, I'm desensitized.
Josh:So well, that's a good, uh, that's a good transition. Here we're um, we thought it'd be interesting to talk about some trails, and we've been traveling a bit. Uh, you have, I have, and uh, we've ridden some different trails and, uh, some of our past episodes where we talked about trails perform really well. So my hypothesis is that our listeners want to hear about trails so it's fun, right?
Dane:yeah, like you, and then it gets you stoked.
Josh:It's a stoke to go right, or?
Dane:Or you were there and you're like I totally remember that, so I think talking about trails is fun.
Josh:So if you have a great trail in your local area that is worthy of talking about on a national scale or international scale, we found out recently that we've got listeners like yeah, I want to hear about trails.
Dane:South Africa.
Josh:With black mambas on them. No shit right.
Dane:Yeah, like seriously. I was not expecting all those dodge black mambas. Oh, can I say something really quick for it? So, um, on our last episode, this, I think it'll be our last episode.
Josh:Yeah, um, we'll post this one.
Dane:next, uh, the um we talked about mentioned I run over snakes.
Josh:I just want to say josh did research and found out that it does hurt them, so please don't do that. Yeah, if you can. Yeah, it will damage them, it will damage their spine, and then they'll likely not eat and then die from starvation I don't want anyone crashing onto them like uh jim noreen did, but uh, but please don't run them over.
Dane:You know, try and bunny hop them so I I have bunny hopped a handful yes, yeah, we, yeah, we have all.
Josh:I think, if you live in the desert, I've also apologized to one Sorry. I always worry that someone's going to get one sucked up into their wheel. That's happened, I've heard, I've seen, I've seen videos of that, but I've never actually witnessed it live.
Dane:So we had a customer on the loop and she was riding, uh, and one of those little squirrels got caught in her front wheel, slammed the wheel, stopped it, flipped her over. Yeah, Like I don't know if she lost a tooth, but she got a little messed up and a shout out to Laura and obviously the squirrel didn't survive.
Josh:No, no, and we had to clean the blood off the body.
Dane:But uh, but yeah, messed her up pretty good Like it was pretty scary.
Josh:So uh, watch her up pretty good, Like it was pretty scary Watch out for those animals.
Dane:So that does happen, all right.
Josh:So we've got a bunch of trails to talk about and we might meander off a little bit about this and talk about some different trails as well, but I wanted to start. Dane and I, actually Dane, took a crew up last week to Prescott, arizona, and there's a new flow trail system, gravity flow trail system. That, uh, gravity flow trail system that they built there. Um, that's got like three phases. They've just built the first phase, called bean peaks. Uh, it's, it's really close to town. It's like three miles out of town you could ride from town.
Dane:You literally could ride from town, although it's uphill, so that would, that would pretty much suck. You could ride your e-bike. We're already on the e-bike. Sorry, all right, never mind, I didn't say that but uh yeah, they just finished.
Josh:There it's. It's an interesting thing. There's not a lot of flow trail systems in arizona no I mean there's um, there's this one, there's haas, it's got some. Yeah, I'm going to talk a little bit later about some stuff in flagstaff that I rode. I'm not aware of any any other ones. Are you guys aware of any other trail like real, like machine-built purpose gravity trail flow systems? Sunrise?
Justin Dietrich:is working on it.
Dane:Yeah, they have a little bit at the bottom right, yeah, and they're doing more building Like they just built a new trail. I think the guys up there Short Bus, you know he was one of the ones that commented on our….
Josh:It's like the Tonto Gravity Yep, Tonto Gravity.
Dane:Chris Johnson and then James.
Josh:Okay.
Dane:So I think they just announced there's a new trail and it's a flow truck. I'm not sure.
Josh:I've never ridden it at sunrise. What I've told is it's pretty chunky. It's like real more.
Justin Dietrich:It's very raw.
Josh:Yeah, it's like backcountry downhill more than yeah.
Dane:It getting more flow. So they're building more and more flow and they're building better jumps and berms, and so they're they're doing a lot more work than I've seen in years. So it's really nice and those guys are working hard. They're up there every weekend. I think Chris personally bought like an excavator, a little mini one.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, he's in it to win it man.
Dane:Yeah, he really is, so I'm thinking about buying one of those I'm going to have to.
Josh:we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that.
Dane:After the end, you have to remind me to shout out or to send this episode to him, let him know that we're talking about him.
Josh:We're talking about him. We weren't even planning on talking about him, we just ended up Yep, but yeah, bean Peak. So three different phases. They finished the first phase. It's 9.2 miles. I got a listing of the trails here.
Dane:It's kind of like a green, like just real good him up, and I used the a toey strap for my son, matt, and towed his ass up the trail, so, which I really appreciated. So, yeah, we I always call that a feeder trail. So there's one trail that goes up. It's pretty mellow. I rode it, no problem, yep, on a 42, 40 pound bike. Yep, so no issues, and got to the top, and then there's different hubs. So I'm noticing that those are the two terms that I'm hearing a lot, are you?
Dane:have a hub and a feeder trail and the hub is where you have a, a gather point and different fingers that go off, different trails that go off.
Josh:Yeah.
Dane:And so when I ride San Diego it's similar. It's a feeder trail up and then you have a hub and then different feeder trails that go off, and sometimes the feeder will go to another hub and have two or three more runs interesting.
Josh:Okay, yeah, so that's definitely how it's set up and and there's, I would say it's it's like it's blue and green.
Dane:They got one black trail but yeah, the blue trails were not very difficult was my experience it was super fun and fast, but like not very difficult at all yeah, and when I talk about, uh, trails, when we talk about trails when we're going to rides and stuff, we always get confused on how they're really. I'm sure somebody's got some sort of format that they're supposed to use, but it doesn't seem to be consistent, like so black trail is different depending on where you go in the country.
Josh:That's my experience.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, absolutely, and that's the biggest thing that there's so many misconceptions is like a double black trail in arizona is serious, consider like x like road trail somewhere else, yeah. Um, I had a guy that was in, not that there aren't hard trails in Wisconsin, but years ago. I was in Sedona and we were riding Highline. We got done. It was a group ride for one of the very first Sedona mountain bike festivals. Um and I got, we got done and we had a I kind of a local guide.
Josh:Yeah.
Justin Dietrich:And so he was showing us all these cool side hits and there's like this one six foot drop and it had a nice transition and then just a bunch of cool stuff Right being in Arizona. We're lucky cause we just we get really hard trails. So, it makes all trails pretty easy. Yep, this guy was like blown away. He's like there's no way I'd ever be able to ride any of this stuff. There's, you know, we have black, double black stuff in Wisconsin and this is this is stuff that only pros can ride.
Josh:And you're like this is a I'm not a pro.
Dane:This is a Tuesday night for us buddy, that guy over there, he's drunk and he's doing it.
Justin Dietrich:It's it varies so much and we get so numb to it, like I'll ride stuff that's double black here and I don't think twice about it, and then when I watch other people crawl down it on their butts, or or whatever. I'm just to me I don't think about it as I ride it that other people would think that this is not doable. Yeah, and so when we talk about trails, especially to people that that have different variants, like with my wife, I took my wife and she's good for about a blue.
Josh:Okay, I took her Arizona blue and.
Justin Dietrich:Arizona blue Yep Right. Which is it's eh it's not that hard. I don't know I I took her on hangover. Maybe that was a mistake. It was a big mistake. I still owe her because hangover to me is like one of the best trails that I've ever been on. The views are spectacular. It's got double black. Goodness that I don't find terribly difficult.
Josh:Yeah. She walked the whole thing. Yeah, like it was terrible. Yeah, she was just for our listeners.
Dane:Where's hangover? So hangovers in sedona yeah and it it hangs over. So like, if you go look on the on youtube, on the youtube and um, look up sedona and watch the videos, you're literally on the side of one of these. Uh, what do you call them mesas? What do you call this cliff?
Dane:yeah, uh, they're like an overhang or something yeah but you're on the edge yeah, yeah, they're, um, they're mesas, but you're on the side of it and you're on one of the ledges and it's only a few feet wide and then there's a cliff and you just ride along, so you're hanging over the trail and then the the side of the hill kind of hangs over you, so you're almost enclosed, like like in a cave.
Josh:Yeah, like half a tunnel, a tunnel. Yeah, yeah, that sounds, that sounds frigging awful it's, it's amazing.
Dane:So and and, like you said, the views are amazing, but it's technical riding and and it is pretty, pretty technical. We, uh we took the not the last ride we did there, but the one before we broke somebody. She broke her ankle or knee or something. We had to walk her out, but uh, but it's a pretty Well.
Josh:Next time we go to Sedona I'll bring our wives. We'll take you, you can ride with my wife and I'll drink a beer at the bar with your wife.
Dane:Yeah, I bet you Lacey would love it. I think she's already ridden Hangover. She's told me about it. It's awesome. And then there's a Highline. Those are the two. Do I confuse, cause they're both Both tough? Yeah.
Justin Dietrich:Well, there's the hog, so there's a triple H, but yeah, um Highline. Going back to trails yeah, is, it's like, probably the most popular trail in Sedona.
Josh:Yeah, it's the most famous, for sure.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, and it's, and it's great Like the, the, the, the Highline downhill awesome. Yeah, you know what is not awesome about highline? The cliff this is no. No, it's not a cliff like I can deal with that. What makes a great trail?
Josh:you were talking about this earlier.
Justin Dietrich:It's finishing on a downhill yeah like when you get done with highline and then you get to go back up to 300, 400 techie feet. Yeah, it's like a buzzkill. Yeah, but I'm a downhiller. Yeah, I don't mind techie climbs a bit.
Dane:I agree, though, like I, I think the best trails you end on the downhill. So you're, you're just kind of coasting in. You're getting that high, that euphoric high, and whether it was techie or and you know if it, whether it was an adrenaline ride or an end, coasting in and just you know. Relaxing afterwards is nice, and all trail builders should work towards that I've always thought about that, like in every race I've done that ended on the uphill.
Josh:It's awful it is like even our little, like you know, whatever simple 24-hour race here right, it's not a tough trail, but you do have a decent climb on the back, and then you, you come you come ripping down for like a mile.
Dane:It's right into the long, but it feels great. Yeah, you get that high coming off of that and even if you're not into downhill, you're still loving it because you're. You're just totally catching your breath and and coming into the tent, not just hating life to throw up.
Josh:I did a ride, I did a race in Prescott, 24 hour race in Prescott, and it ended with a gnarly yeah.
Dane:I know that should be like rule one in the rule book. Yeah, all right.
Josh:So I'm going to come back to bean peak, so, um, so I would say super for me as like a, like I'm a blue, like starting to ride blacks. That's kind of where my level's at.
Dane:Yeah, so how many trails do they have?
Josh:Yeah, so they have one, two, three, four five blue trails and then three green trails that are downhill and then the one that climbs up the feeder, the feeder and so 9.2 miles, all those trails we just talked about.
Josh:And then in the fall of this year they're going to start phase two, which is going to add another 6.9 miles. In the fall of phase three they're going to add 4.7 miles for a total of 20.8 miles. You can check it out at beampeaksprescottmtbcom. We'll put a link in the show notes here. But just you know cool that that group, that Prescott group up there, is doing this. And I'd say, if you're looking to get like new riders into the sport, I think there's no better way than like some fun flow trail with like a little bit different variation in the difficulty.
Dane:Totally, because the feeder trail is super easy, so it's not hard. You can take beginners out.
Josh:There's plenty of green trails coming down If you want Most of those.
Dane:Even with jumps in them or their tables, you can just roll right over the tops.
Josh:But there was also some big features, like a handful of like really big rocks and stuff like that, but they were alternate. You didn't have to do it. They were beelines, alternate like yeah you didn't have to do it, they were b lines, yeah. So if you have like a group with mixed skills, yeah, I think everybody would have some fun, I mean you guys are amazing riders. I loved it, did you? I had a blast, yeah I and we did everything.
Dane:We just kept doing lap after lap after lap, and our goal was to ride every single trail which we did yeah, I can't remember which the long one was. Was it cool beans?
Josh:yeah, that was my long. That was my favorite one actually. I think it had the best lines and the best features.
Dane:Yeah, but uh, the fact that they built it, it's awesome. Uh, they, you know, they've got berms, they've. I mean just, you know, I was thinking about it when we just just got back from big bear and so finding something like this yeah, not yet, not yet. Yep, we'll tell you more about that afterwards. Secret stuff going on, can't talk um but uh, but I mean it's. I think something like this is the future. So again this format in.
Dane:I see it in san diego, but they're not always sanctioned trails okay, and they're just a bunch of bootleg trails, or social trails they did a double track that goes to some big hill in the middle of suburbia that's got a tower on it and so they are able to ride up there and then they just start carving techie social jump lines and social trails down to the bottom and it's the same format, just that easy climb, you know uh, to the top and then a bunch of short like mile long you're going to have to give me some locations.
Josh:We're going to be back out there in October.
Dane:Anderson Truck Trail, okay, and then there's Ted Williams. Okay, those are the two main ones. Yep, there's another one that I can't remember the name, I just know it's behind a Walmart.
Justin Dietrich:I'll start just driving to all the.
Dane:Walmarts and see it looking uphill. I can then uh so yeah, there's.
Josh:I think that format is really cool, so that's awesome all right, so, um, the next trail I want to talk about is uh, is a trail that you did, that these guys well, have you ridden pro portal?
Justin Dietrich:no, but I've ridden up in moab.
Josh:Yeah, ridden up in moab this is one of the trails in in in portal and or in moab, the portal trail, and like a dangerous challenge for true experts, a scenic hike, a bike for mortals listed, you know, and that is a good description right Right.
Dane:Yeah, cause we just did a guru trip there and I took a bunch of people and maybe two of us, maybe three of us, actually wrote it. The rest walked.
Josh:Yeah, so bike mag says it's one of the deadliest trails in the world, and not that long ago, kevin Kirk, who's 43 years old, died, and he fell off a cliff. Oh shit, 200 foot cliff Right.
Dane:I was wondering how many people have actually died there, cause the sign says people have died.
Josh:This is the only person that I've been able to actually pinpoint the name there's a lot of like hyperbole about it out there, but this guy really actually died. He fell off yeah.
Dane:So so we're talking about a portal trail in Moab, yeah, so tell us about it. So we did it as a part of the mag seven, and so there's a whole what's?
Josh:what's the mag seven?
Dane:So it's supposed to be seven trails but there's a bunch of different trails out near Navajo Rocks, a little bit past Navajo Rocks on 313, I think.
Justin Dietrich:Isn't it up near the White Rim, kind of up in that area?
Dane:Yeah, I can't remember that I just again on satellite, on Google satellite, I could find I can tell you exactly where this trail is but I don't know most of the road numbers.
Josh:I mean, this is popular enough if you've got trail forks or anything you can just put in portal trail. Make sure there's a lot of portal trails in the world.
Dane:I learned yes, there's one in. This is tucson, there's one here, yeah, near 36th street. Yeah, I was like what? Yeah, so you got to put in portal utah specifically, but you'll find in and, if you have, trail forks.
Josh:You got to download the utah yeah like version of trail fork.
Dane:so mag 7 is a uh, you put together different trails so, like we did that, right as you leave the highway um 3, 3, 13, uh, we got on a trail called bull run and bull run is around five miles and it's super scenic. You're along these um canyons it's called canyon lands, that whole area. We're near Arches National Park and stuff and you just got these huge cliffs and you're riding slick rock along them and the trails are awesome. They spray paint little colors, so they're all color-coded, which is really cool.
Josh:So that's like the trail marking is spray paint on the ground.
Dane:Yeah, because the trail is sometimes just on a huge slabs of rock.
Josh:So you wouldn't know if you didn't have those spray paintings.
Dane:And so you're going. They're usually blues or sometimes blacks, and that's mainly because you're kind of going up little shelves and down little shelves.
Josh:So are these Arizona blacks and blues, or are these Utah blacks and blues?
Dane:No, definitely not, Because you know everybody's like scared because they're black. Some were black, somebody wrote them and they're like no no, no, big deal. Is it just the exposure? I think it's the exposure. Yeah, um, I think, uh, I don't know what the definitions are. I wish, I wish we were, I wish I had thought about being prepared for that cause. We don't know what the definitions, why one trail organization will call it a blue and another one would call it a black.
Josh:Yeah, we're. We're definitely finding that there's a variation.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, place to place we go, I feel like trail systems that have a lot more popularity, like Moab and Sedona and all that kind of stuff, will rate their trails a little harder. Yeah, harder than what we would think.
Josh:Interesting.
Justin Dietrich:So, like Highline being a double black, I'm like no.
Josh:Is that like a?
Justin Dietrich:liability thing you think uh, I don't know if it's a liability thing, but they probably had enough people. They get themselves in over their head yeah, I think they're scaring off.
Josh:They're super popular.
Justin Dietrich:It's like, hey, be careful you go to hangover and there is a sign when you get to the actual hangover off cow pies and it says expert, only double black, like exposed cliffs, all the things. There's a sign that says it. Yeah. And there's still people up there.
Josh:And your wife still just followed you and said yeah, no problem.
Justin Dietrich:Well, she was with that was my fault, yeah, but I mean I guarantee you there've been people up there in tennis shoes and khakis and, like, not prepared, rented a bike and let's go try this trail.
Dane:Yep, yeah, wrong idea or something. Yeah, wrong idea. And so, yeah, that's a big criteria. I heard there's some criteria is if there's a certain amount of drop, like if there's a drop even on the trail, it'll rate that trail that automatically as a blur or something, exactly Things like that.
Dane:So, um, so, back to portal tech, get us, get us to portal. Bull run, beautiful, scenic, slick rock, pretty slow, gradual descent, so not hard, not hard, uh, no, no big climbs. Then you, we, you can choose different, um, different uh, trails. So that was the most confusing thing on the mag 7 for me is that it's not a set route. When you go to trail forks or mountain bike project, there's different routes that people have made and so you kind of have to choose. And that was the hardest thing, and I don't know about other people, but I really struggle when I go to new places If I don't know like the defined and I have to figure it out. That drives me nuts.
Josh:Cause you got to stop pull out your phone study it, yeah.
Dane:And then you're trying to decipher all this info and those. Those apps are beautiful, but they over overdo it, like you can know everything. You can know elevation, you can know all this stuff. I want to see a topo, I want to see an elevation so that I can know how much climbing or descending I'm going to do. And then I kind of want to know yes, this is a good route, or this is the popular route, so you need, like trail forks for dummies.
Dane:I totally do, god, I would buy that. You know, I don't, I won't pay for trail forks, if you're listening.
Josh:I guess they're owned by Outside right Because Outside owns Pinkbike.
Justin Dietrich:I bought into Trail Forks when they had, like, the paywall was put in place and they're like, hey, if you buy in now, you get the good guy deal forever. Oh, I don't remember what it is. I missed that. It's like $12 a year or something.
Josh:It's really low.
Dane:I think I pay for it.
Josh:I'm too cheap.
Justin Dietrich:Well, you could have my password. Oh sweet.
Josh:Don't tell him that he's just kidding, I'm not kidding. We're just kidding. Trail Force. He's not kidding. There's a lot of people that use my pink bike.
Justin Dietrich:But if you were to go to Utah, you cannot download Utah. Why download Utah? You have to subscribe because you don't live in Utah. Oh, so that's what I that's what I found out.
Dane:If you, if you don't, if you haven't paid for the subscription, so get this. You want to know the trick that I did? So I found out that if you, you don't subscribe, but you create a free profile while you're in Utah they'll let you pick your home. Well, they don't know where you live, and so I picked Utah.
Josh:Were you in Utah when you picked Utah no.
Dane:And I just picked Utah and then that became my home. So now when I'm trying to find trails up in Phoenix, I'm screwed. I can't see them.
Josh:You won't pay for the trail parks.
Dane:No, I have too many friends, like they all have it, like everybody has it, but I just go along, but so I don't even know how we got on TrailParks. So basically we're going with routes and all that kind of stuff.
Justin Dietrich:If you're familiar with TrailParks, you can look at routes Like if you were to be on Bull Run. You can click on that trail bink and it'll actually show you routes that are attached to that trail and then you can actually download that route if you wanted to. It's way too many buttons, not too bad Once you figure out how to do it.
Dane:Like backpackers got this stuff dialed right, yeah, yeah, well, and they need a lot of time, because if they go a mile out of their way, they may die.
Justin Dietrich:They get a lot of time, yeah, but it's not too difficult, but that way you have that route open. At least, that's it. It basically is follow. Okay, there's no smoke, there's no smoke.
Dane:No smoke, no smoke, um, okay. So so we, you know, basically I'm I'm watching these routes. You can take different ones. We did a great escape and that was the last time I did this trail. We did a different one. I think we kept on Bulls Run, so this time we diverted because one of the guides that took us on some other trails told us it was a good way to go.
Dane:It takes you away from the road that these parallel and it's the same stuff Really. It just keeps following slick rocks, slightly downhill, lots of canyons. There's really cool scenic. You can look over valleys, you're up on these huge mesas looking over these things, and then Great Escape hooks up with Gold Bar Climb, and the Gold Bar Climb is the hardest part of the trail. That one was. You basically have gotten to the lowest point for the most part and that's the place you can bail.
Dane:So if you are not sure, if you want to do techie stuff on this trail, you can go out a trail called Gemini Bridges Road and that'll take you out. You still need to do it as a shuttle or you can turn around. Gold Bar is kind of the turnaround point, the point of no return, yeah, and so that's mostly Jeep Road. You go up to what is Gold Bar 2.3 miles road. You go up to uh, what is gold bar 2.3 miles, and you basically get to the top of the edge of one of these, the rim of one of these mesas, and you're looking over arches national park. It's beautiful.
Josh:Like you can see the arches, like you can oh wow, yeah, I mean, I didn't realize it was that close to moab it's.
Dane:Oh yeah, it's right there. In fact, if, as you go on this uh, gold bar, you curve around a little bit and you look at the town of Moab, you're right about Moab. So in fact you do. Gold bar is one of my favorites and it's the one that I. It's frustrating because I would say, by the time you get there, you are wiped. It's a pretty hard trail, though. You did another 10 or 15 miles of slight downhill to get to where you're going. You're still picking your bike up over these ledges and down these ledges, and a lot of muscular work. And then, when you climb gold bar, we usually have lunch and we're right on the edge, looking over arches, looking over the highway, and you can see the bar M trails. You can see the river, like it's. It's awesome, and it's hundreds of feet, hundreds of feet, hundreds of feet down.
Dane:Um, so right there after lunch you start gold bar rim trail. Yep, and it is my favorite section. Uh, it takes you through the rocks, uh, and so you're up on this ledge. You can see the cliff on the left side. You're not like right on it, it's maybe six to ten feet, you know, in most cases and sometimes farther away and then on the right, the whole mesa slopes down into the canyon, and so it's like this kind of like looks like a ramp, and so you're on the top edge, going along the edge, and the trail takes you up and down these stacked rocks and all these obstacles, and so you're going down these obstacles and they'll stack rocks to make it able to get down them.
Dane:Sometimes there's a drop and then stacked rocks to get you up, and so you have to use balance. There's decent consequences. You're not going to fall off a cliff, but it's going to hurt and uh, and it's really muscular. Here it's not a little cardio, but a lot muscular not getting up and over. And so then you basically do this um, gold bar rim, and it's about 3.6 miles.
Dane:So if you weren't wiped at lunch, you're definitely wiped now, yeah, and that's when you get to the portal, uh uh, entrance and it. Basically you can do portal which is 2.5 miles and that's when you get to the portal, entrance, and basically you can do portal which is 2.5 miles. Yeah, or if you chicken out, which some people do, Did you have anyone chicken out on your team?
Dane:No, because here's the logic If you chicken out, you have to go 9.2 miles on a dirt Jeep road which is probably, you know, the four by fours do, which is probably super sandy and up and down, and so if you aren't wiped, you know walking two and a half miles sounds better than riding 9.2 miles at that point, and so I talked everyone into it.
Dane:So, um, so, once you get to Portal, you're on that rim trail and you're basically at an edge where basically that mesa slopes down towards the river and the canyon is still starts to climb on your right. So you're basically going down. It looks like a ramp, but it's narrow, and the first obstacle you get to is a hard left and it's chunky, and so they kind of call it a qualifier. You know, I don't know if you ever four by four, but sometimes at the entrance of four by four trails they'll put a big hump so that people don't take their caprice. You know, on the four by four trail, yeah, and so you got to have clearance you know, and they'll kind of have these qualifiers.
Dane:And so the first obstacle you have is this left and it goes down. It's chunky and hard to go down and I think I dabbed, but I wrote it and then basically it's pretty smooth going, it's not super exposed, and then it starts to get narrower and narrower, this ramp that you're going down. That's basically until it finally the cliff is on your right. It's no longer you on top, you now see the cliff on your right. You're on this ramp that keeps getting narrower and it starts to get down to about two to three feet in some areas, jesus. And then you've got a 200-foot cliff on your left.
Josh:So it's saying here that it's in some cases as high as 1,300 feet.
Dane:That's easy. Yeah, I totally get that, because 200 doesn't seem that high. No, and when you're at the beginning of it.
Justin Dietrich:You're really high, you're really like fall 200 feet and then you're going to roll another 200 feet.
Dane:Yeah, yeah, like it's 200 sheer and then to a you know like tapered, uh, uh, and keep going. So it's really. I mean, it's crazy. It's so scenic. Though you're looking over, um, I think it's the Colorado River and Moab right there, and you can see this river winding through these cliffs and you see them on the other side. You can see the tiny little cars down at the bottom and eventually, after a little while as it narrows, you get to a sign. Everybody takes a picture of the sign because it says something like dismount. Now you know, um, people have died, people just like you.
Dane:I think that's almost word for word what it says, people just yeah, yeah and it's, and it's showing pictures of a guy like did you guys take a picture of that sign?
Josh:oh, everybody does. Yeah, can you send that to me?
Dane:we'll use that for this episode yeah, um, so and uh, so, right, that sign. The reason they put that sign is you. You basically have this giant rock that's fallen, that's blocking the trail and it's kind of hanging over and you have to go around it, and then there's two more rocks that you have to hop up onto and then go over and then get back onto the trail, and so it's really easy because you're kind of poked out to fall off to fall off, and so now people ride this.
Dane:If you watch some of the videos, you'll see the guys ride these and I'm just it's insane.
Justin Dietrich:You didn't ride that Hell no.
Dane:I'm not that I mean, don't? You know? I don't want to sound like a Superman. I dab a couple spots that I'll walk Um, once you get past that point, it's pretty much. You just have to watch your step. It's still narrow and there's a bunch of shelves you have to go up, and sometimes the shelves are at angles, so you got to really watch out for those. So if you're, if you're going up a curb like that's what I mean when I say a shelf, like something that's like six to eight inches high you got to lift your foot up. Um, it's at an angle. It's easy to get your front wheel up, but your rear wheel usually you don't lift up, slide down, slide, and so that is one of the things that I see. A lot of people make mistakes. They'll hit that, that off angle uh curb and they'll slide the back end and then they'll fall, and so you got to watch out for those you guys have anyone to fall on the trail?
Dane:no luckily no. Most, most people, people were walking in the really scary places. The cool thing about the trail is, once you get past that sign and probably I'd say a quarter mile at the most, it starts to get wider and safer.
Dane:Yeah, you start to have boulders that are on your left instead of a cliff and you get into this kind of shoot and you're like, yeah, it's super techie, there's a couple corners where they're super steep, uh switchbacks that are like drop after drop after drop, and you're turning while you're dropping and there's just stacks of rocks and it's I. I love going through that stuff and when I make it I'm just stoked, you know, and sometimes it's so narrow your bars don't even want to fit, and you come around the corner and you've made it and you're like, you know, you're just shouting and it's just awesome. And, um, you're not really as scared about falling off a cliff. You still can flip over and smack into rocks you know.
Josh:So it's still.
Dane:The price is probably not death yeah, yeah, it's, it's broken bones and you're gonna walk out but, uh, and then, uh, once you get through those sections, it starts to open up and turns into this high speed. Just I love it. It's high speed, hooten, techie, like reminds me of downhill racing, because you're yeah, you're still, you have to maneuver and you're coming, and you're coming in hot, and you have to hit these drops, uh, to get through them, but they're, it's wide open, you're no longer near a cliff, a cliff, and that ramp that you're coming down is turning into slick rock in places, and then you have to get up a little shelf and then go traverse some dirt and then you finally get into rock again and finally, when you finally get down to the bottom, it turns into gravel, which is the craziest thing, and then just pops you out on a road and usually everybody's parked along that road and that's where your shuttle picks you up so interesting yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's one of my favorites.
Dane:And so here's the interesting thing about portal uh, when we got done, everybody hated me. Damn you they were, they were like pissed, they were like most of them walked. I think it took a couple hours, that's like like type three fun.
Josh:Oh yeah, so like not fun at the time, but it's fun when you're telling the story later the guy picking us up was the best Cause he thought about.
Dane:He took a bunch of washcloths from the hotel and stuck them in a cooler full of wet water and so when we got to the bottom, we had all these wet, you know super cold washcloths we could put on us, cause it was really hot. You know, it wasn't middle of the summer, it was still pretty hot and we're hanging out, we have drinks, we have a cooler, we're hanging out and there's I think I was one of the first ones down, bert, and there was someone in front of you on the video uh, bert, yeah, cause when we stopped to take pictures, bert kept going and so and and he's kind of like that, he's like I'm just going to do it, and he rode most of it. He did a good job. I was really, really impressed.
Josh:Do you guys have anyone on your team that's named Ernie?
Dane:No, but that would be cool.
Josh:You should, you could be.
Dane:Ernie, because then Bert could ride with Ernie.
Justin Dietrich:I know an Ernie.
Dane:Do you? He's a nice guy.
Josh:Does he mountain bike? He's a ripper. Do you want an e-bike?
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, I do, I race them, it's awesome Yep.
Josh:Yeah, wait, no e-bikes I thought we weren't going to talk about e-bikes. No, we're good, we're good.
Dane:All right.
Josh:So I've got a list here from single tracks of, based on their user rating, the 17 most difficult trails in the world. And I'm just curious Cause like these things are, like I don't know that I could ever ride any of these things and I'm pretty sure you guys have written some of these One's got to be in Peru.
Dane:Tell me where there's one in Peru.
Josh:Well, let me go down. I'm going to see, and this is going to start with the easiest and get to go to the hardest. So the deer Canyon, deer Creek Canyon, littleton, colorado never been there, nope, nope, I've seen a video on that one.
Dane:I don't Where's San Luis Obispo near. Is that near San Diego or LA? I?
Josh:think it's north right. Like more Sacramento, san Francisco, I think, I think.
Dane:Okay, don't quote me. Someone's going to comment and give us an email. I'm going to put that on the list.
Josh:Sorry to our California folks. Lunatic Fringe, green River, west Virginia. No, no, that's Wyoming.
Justin Dietrich:Oh, it's Wyoming, Sorry.
Josh:Thank you. No WI Ridgeway Loop, elijah Georgia. No no. Moraine State Park, newcastle, pennsylvania. No Portal. Oh yeah, we talked about Portal, dirt Digger Downhill. Done that, fernie BC, canada? Yep that fernie bc canada? Yep, done that, done that one.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, wasatch trail and telluride I've ridden and tell you right, I don't know if I rode that trail, to be honest with you I wrote a lot. I feel like I wrote a lot up there, but so we did like what is it?
Dane:the hopper and all those ones on the mountain. But I don't know if it's on the the mountain or I don't think this is.
Justin Dietrich:I think I rode the blacks at telluride, and they were not heard yeah, so the telluride bike park is chill like I mean it's kind of steep tech or whatever for bark pike but bike bike park. But I did the big mountain enduro. Um, that was tough.
Dane:That was a tough day on a bike, yeah yeah, if you have to go up and telluride it's gonna be a tough day, just because the altitude yeah you start at 10.
Josh:Oh shit, shit Start. Seriously, that's like Leadville yeah.
Justin Dietrich:And so, um, yeah, that was a big day and I don't remember doing anything too, too crazy. I remember going up a trail, that where the locals were like, why are you guys going up that?
Josh:literally you're going the wrong way, okay, um, what else? All right, so so I was Wasatch, uh, elizabeth furnace front, royal Virginia. Probably not five miles of hell. Green river Virginia Probably not Five Miles of Hell. Green River Utah no, I have heard of that.
Dane:Have you, Yep? I've heard of it.
Justin Dietrich:It doesn't sound appealing. It is. I don't remember who I was talking to, but they legitimately said it was super, super difficult. Okay.
Josh:Garbanzo at Whistler. Yes done that, so that's number 11 out of 17. So we're getting pretty hard here. Oklahoma Ankle Express hiking trail Oklahoma's flat. Hey man, it's like number 12.
Justin Dietrich:There's no way.
Dane:We're going to have someone call.
Josh:Someone's going to call in from Oklahoma like you have no idea, they took our mountain.
Justin Dietrich:No offense.
Josh:I don't even know if people from Oklahoma have a Southern accent, but that's good.
Dane:We're going to get some hate mail. That's South Park. I don't even know what that accent is.
Josh:Hurricane Creek in Cullman, alabama, no RG Winter Park, mifflinburg, pennsylvania. There actually is some mountains in Pennsylvania.
Dane:I've heard Pennsylvania is super rocky. I've been to Whitetail in Pennsylvania. I've heard Pennsylvania. I've been to White Tail in Pennsylvania.
Josh:I did the 24 Hours of Big Bear in West Virginia, just south of Pennsylvania.
Justin Dietrich:That was gnarly.
Dane:Yeah, that was gnarly, they have roots.
Josh:They do have some serious rocks.
Dane:Yeah, that's for sure.
Josh:I'll never forget this man, the lady that came out when we pulled into the state park. She had no shoes and no teeth.
Dane:No way, I'm not kidding.
Josh:And so one of the teams said ride fast.
Justin Dietrich:I hear banjos.
Josh:But it was a great trail, it was a great. I don't mean to be disparaging, but it was. It was a great experience. But just that part of the country, morgan territory, livermore, california North star ski resort, yep Truckee.
Dane:California, no, north Star Ski Resort Truckee, california. Yeah, which one? It just says North Star. Oh, there's some easy ones there, but what is it? Shoot Dogbone, and I think it's called Reaper, I can't remember. There's a couple of really hard ones at North Star.
Josh:Bar Trail, Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs. We could probably ask you.
Dane:I think I did that one. I think if it's lower Pikes Peak, I think I did that one.
Josh:That's the hardest one on the list. So, you've got your like bucket list right here of like trails.
Dane:You guys need to go ride, yeah, and we've only done like one or two of them.
Justin Dietrich:All right, so, going off of that, since Dane and I are kind of same level-ish, what is the hardest trail? You have written, josh, oh that's a good question.
Josh:So not that much Painter boy.
Dane:I don't even know what that is. That's the one at the 24. But let's.
Josh:Oh yeah, painter boy Wasn't that hard, it wasn't technical. Um, it was just like overgrown. Yeah, so if we been to angel fire, obviously. So I've written everything in angel fire, I think, besides like the downhill and like upper supreme, okay, so I've written everything there, like some of the harder things, I'd say I, I survived. Um, like the simple blacks, I can make it down and have a great time. All the blues, I can make it down, I have a great time. Like trails, like angel plunge, if you remember that on the left hand side, yeah, some of those switchbacks I couldn't make it down. It was like super steep switchbacks. I almost fell off the bridge that goes over the Canyon. It was raining, you know. I just my back wheel fell off and chicken wires wore out.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, chicken wire, that's exactly what happened.
Josh:But, um, I've been up there about five times. That's the only bike park I've been to is angel fire, oh, um, so I don't know if that gives you like. I read prison camp, but I've never done bug Springs.
Justin Dietrich:Okay, okay, yeah. What about you? What about you, dane? What's the hardest? What hardest?
Dane:trail that you can remember trying to ride. You know it's not on that list but, uh, if I do bike parks I think it's called Lucky, look that up on your phone. It is like I had to scoot down on my butt on this trail. It's so steep and nasty and loose and like roots and powder. Like it takes everything that you don't want to ride and throws it in one trail and then puts it so steep you can't walk down it. Like I had to scoot down and like lower my bike with my arm and then scoot down and then lower my bike. That's how steep this trail was. That's one of the hardest I've ever been on.
Dane:And we raced that mountain, uh, during the world cup. And there's another section that we went through the trees that was all roots. It was like just this, this, uh carpet steepness of roots. That, uh, we ended up just crashing. Like you're just like, okay, let's just how can we crash without getting hurt and then get up fast and keep racing because everybody crashed there. So those kinds of things are are what are my hardest, you know so the hardest trails they have listed, there is one called links links.
Dane:That's it, okay, yeah the links.
Josh:Is the world cup downhill?
Dane:yeah, if you start links just to look at it. You're gonna have to scoot down it like, because otherwise you got to walk way back up because you start into it, and it's that's the ones that get me, the ones that you start. Oh, um, you know the whistler. There was a bunch that have skinnies anytime I get a skinny.
Justin Dietrich:I can't do those and there's a couple.
Dane:I'm not a uh a line or b line those are easy, right? I think yeah there's one I can't remember. I loved it, except it took you into these skinnies and so, and then they start you low and wide, you know yeah uh, more um stockies, not skinnies, and so they're wide fatties and then fatties.
Dane:Yeah, it goes, fatties but then they start raising them off the ground, like you're off the ground, like an, they're still, they're still fatties, they're fatties. And you're off a foot and then they go to stockies and then you're two feet off the ground and then they go to skinnies and you're like four feet off the ground and I'm like, ah, I was just, I them, I crashed like three times. So so those get me all the time.
Josh:We don't do a lot of skinnies here in Arizona, no it doesn't last, that's so one thing.
Dane:I noticed about yeah, that's what I noticed about Whistler is they, it's all cedar up there. They just cut up a tree and then just plank it out and it's cedar it lasts forever yeah it's funny because there's sections of trail that are hard, but the whole trail not be that bad, right.
Justin Dietrich:So, like in different areas, like I think about a couple of obstacles on Hangover, yeah Right, like one obstacle on Highline In Grand Junction there's a trail on the Tabahawki Trails. I can't remember exactly what the name of the trail system is out there. It's really weird. Uh, american, indian name. But um, the lunch loops, eagle's wing has a really tacky section in there, like it's full commit and like it's almost full commit to where you don't have time to slow down so you have to go through them all at the same time so it's pretty legit.
Justin Dietrich:Um, those are that. That. That one was pretty hard um flying monkey.
Dane:Oh yeah, flying well, and we didn't even try kong, where's flying? Where's flying monkeys?
Justin Dietrich:that's yeah, no, that's um near near hurricane okay, yeah, and it's.
Dane:It's on the same mountain as a lot of the red bull. It's just around the side a little bit. Did you hear? Was it you that keeps telling me how that got its name?
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, so they legitimately used to fire monkeys off of that cliff, off of rockets back when they sent monkeys to space.
Dane:Yeah, Shut up, not joking, that can't be true.
Josh:They would put them on rocket sleds that were up there and to check G-forces. We're going to have to fact check that it's true, and when you go up there, you go next to it, right.
Dane:There's a big fenced area.
Josh:I'm Google searching, you guys keep talking.
Justin Dietrich:Even just the entrance to Kong. You called it a qualifier. Yeah, that's a qualifier. I've heard it's called a squirrel catcher.
Dane:I. You called it a qualifier. Yeah, that's a qualifier. So I've heard it's called a squirrel catcher. Yeah, squirrel catcher, it is legit. I don't understand squirrel catcher?
Justin Dietrich:We don't have squirrels here, so I don't know either.
Dane:Okay.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, like that entrance to that is legit and I want to try Kong.
Dane:Dude, when we looked at it, you did a drop. It was like five feet to six feet to like no landing right, and then you had to do a drop again. I think I can't remember what it was, but it was like we all looked at it. There was no takeoff like you had to do. It was like a slab.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, that had a gap, yeah, you had a pull, yeah, into a drop right into a drop, yeah, and then kind of into a shoot with two rocks on either either side. So you basically had to like, grab a bunch of breaks after you do a big pull off of a sloped slab yeah with a gap at the bottom. Yeah, and then, just thread through these two big rocks then. Then there's a drop after that yep and then after that it settles down and you can take your time and pick your way down, but like just that squirrel catcher yeah, like yeah, umt, a writer from Grand Junction broke his femur, there.
Justin Dietrich:Oh geez.
Josh:Okay, so it's been confirmed.
Dane:What'd you find?
Josh:out. In the 50s they had this thing called the Supersonic Military Air Resource Track on Hurricane Mesa. Chimpanzees were used as test subjects by the US Air Force as part of an air and space research program. Tests on the Mesa used crash test dummies instead. Interesting yeah. These parachute-clad dummies were strapped to rockets, led to test the effects of high-speed flights and injections.
Dane:Wow, so they actually did use chimpanzees for a minute, yeah, and then at some point I'm sure somebody was like this sucks chimpanzees. For a minute it sounds like yeah, and then at some point, I'm sure somebody was like they got the 1950s.
Josh:They got the 1950s level of like, yeah, you know, politically correct and we stopped using chimpanzees.
Dane:But yeah, that trail is called flying monkey now hey, dad joke.
Justin Dietrich:Okay, oh, another one. Maybe that's why they call them boomers oh man, I don't know that's uh, that's hard to connect.
Dane:That's that's all right, all right, all right, I'm reaching, I'm reaching. Okay, so we talked about portal.
Josh:We talked about portal. So last week, um, my wife, my, my kid had a, uh, a soccer turn or soccer clinic up in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona university, a small, small mountain town and kind of uh, in the North North part of Arizona. Beautiful it's, I think it's like at six thousand feet seven yeah seven thousand feet um. There's a ski resort there, snowball or arizona snowball, and uh she's like we're gonna go it's gonna be great.
Josh:We're gonna ride all week and I've ridden up there before and I never really I used to do a race up there. Uh, oh shit, what was? The barn burner yeah, I used to do the barn burner every year and, uh, one year that it got rained out and we actually went and rode and we rode kind of like all along the Walnut Creek and it was all kind of pretty mellow like cross country trails or whatever, and they got the Fort Tuthill bike park there, which is pretty cool.
Josh:It's got a cool pump track. It's got some big, like big, big giant dirt jumps, like like mountain bike dirt jumps, not so much like dirt jumps or jumps jumps. Uh, it's got some skinnies or fatties.
Dane:It's got everything like it's. It's a pretty cool I I really like it's a great park and there's a little cross-country course that goes around it too.
Josh:It's not super tech or anything, but so we had fun at the bike park, but I was not expecting it to be fun at all. Um, one of our, our local guys here, part of sdnb, mike mucker, I know, you know, mike you might know mike.
Josh:But mike hit was there that same week and he had worked with one of the trail builders up there and gotten a list of like, here's the places that you have to ride. So we had, like this really specific list of things to do, okay, and we rode a bunch. We rode six or seven days, but two trails stood out to me that I want to talk about, and the first one was called Full Sail. Okay, and that's new, right, it's brand new. I think it just opened like a week ago or something.
Josh:It was fresh. Hang on, I got a little right up here. So it's a machine-built flow trail numerous tabletops, jumps, berms and other challenging features, optional easier lines, which is 100% true, so you can roll rather than jump everything. It's built by Flagline Traline trails. They're a local trail and bike park builder, um, and it was funded by katina foundation. Anyways, um 2.9 miles, okay, and it's, and it's connected to, like a whole bunch of other trails, so you kind of so where is that?
Josh:so it's in your buffalo park or no? So it's it, it's Schultz Creek area. Okay, oh, okay, so we, so we park at the base of Schultz Creek and then there's like a seven mile kind of like just dirt road that you ride up and then you cut over on trails. There's about another three or four miles up, so it's a pretty hefty climb. I mean, it was 2,800 feet climb to get up to.
Josh:But then you do this amazing flow trail and then it's all downhill and there's 50 different ways that you can come down from there and all different kinds of topography and difficulty of the trails and we tried a bunch of different ways down but we absolutely loved it. So if you're in the Flagstaff area, go check out Full Sail. It's worth the climb. And then the other thing we did was the AZT Arizona Trail section. That's called San Francisco peaks, okay, and we parked up at the top of, we shuttled up to the top of Arizona snowball, okay, we parked in the parking lot and then we rode 20 miles back down into town, which was outside of like a three mile section you have to climb for a minute.
Dane:Yeah.
Josh:All downhill the whole way, yep, and at the top there's about a four mile stretch of what I'd call like a three mile section. You have to climb for a minute. Yeah, all downhill the whole way, yep, and at the top there's about a four mile stretch of what I'd call like a from from from my perspective, like a high blue, not a black trail, but like a high blue, I mean it was. It was four miles of tech. You were the whole time you were teching and you could go around to like park at the ski resort and then ride 20 miles down. Flagstaff's got amazing restaurants and stuff and we went and had beers and had some lunch at the brewery down there.
Josh:Yeah, Just a great time. So if you end up in Flagstaff, worth checking out full sail, worth checking out the AZT part called San Francisco Peaks.
Dane:Yeah, san Francisco, you get to do as a shuttle.
Josh:You don't have to. You can actually go down the back side of it and it's 12.5 miles total from like the road where you normally get off, which is kind of the road that goes up to, and then it goes all the way down to the back side. You turn around and come back okay, and that's what mucker did okay but we were with my son who, uh, he's 15 and doesn't um want to pedal at all. It sounds like my 13 year old.
Dane:Sounds like me.
Josh:So a 20 mile downhill and he was on a knee bike, but a 20 mile downhill was just up his alley and he's one of these kids that we take him. He doesn't ride much. He's grown up at the Premises Skate Park, or I don't know if he's been inside. Premises Park. But he's got that air awareness and we take him to, uh, to angel fire, like once a year Yep, and he goes down like I don't know if you know, trail hungry, hungry hippos.
Dane:Oh yeah, hungry hippos.
Josh:Huge and he hits every jump blind. Yeah, Clears everything like full send and clears everything. He just has that perfect like timing and air awareness and he knows how to like do everything that you do to do that shit it's amazing watching him. So he's really good at technical, really good at helps that he's built. Dirt jumps in your yard. He we've got. Yeah, we do have a double half pipe in my house and we have a. We have dirt jumps at the house and all that stuff. So yeah, except they built them uphill.
Dane:No, yeah, like you come off and you go into the backyard and there's.
Josh:We're going to go in our big rabbit hole now, but the plan for that was we were going to build a platform off the, off the half pipe.
Dane:Yeah.
Josh:So you know, the half pipe on that side, I think, is 12 feet tall. And so we were going to build a little place where you can like a, like a, where you can push your bike up and then, and then a good platform down and then you have a little bit of uphill there.
Dane:Towards the road.
Josh:No, away from the road. Away from the road, away from the road and then they have the start of dirt jumps all along the back of my fence.
Dane:So it's going to be about? I don't know seven jumps, so then they would go slightly uphill, but they have that ramp.
Josh:And then everything's downhill from there, and then it'd be downhill All the way around. Yeah, so yeah, that was the only way we could do it.
Dane:That's cool. There's pros that do that stuff with their houses. You go to their house and the backyard is all dirt jumps.
Josh:I wanted to bring one of the jumps up over our fence so they jump into the backyard and then cruise and then jump out of the backyard. That would be ugh.
Dane:Yeah.
Josh:But I would never ride that, but that's their stuff. Anyways, that's Flagstaff, okay, and then the uh, the last thing I thought we could talk about today.
Dane:You guys just recently took a trip to to big bear?
Josh:yep, yeah, and they've got the two parks there snow valley and snow summit. Yep, um, tell me about it, man, I've never been there I want to add one thing to flagstaff shoot if you are looking for max nar in flagstaff max narnar, you go for private reserve, okay. Yeah, I got a private reserve. I'm not right there, super, is that in that Wasatch or that? Where's it at?
Justin Dietrich:It's hard to describe.
Josh:Is it near Schultz? Yeah, it's in the Schultz Creek area.
Justin Dietrich:Okay, um, I went looking for it and I ended up at the bottom of it because I wasn't reading my map correctly. Like a dummy, I was on the e-bike, so I wasn't totally host, but there's no way to go up it Like you. If you could, I would have had to gone around and at that point I was already I don't know 3000 feet into it and I was over it. But, um, I've watched plenty of videos of it.
Dane:Yeah.
Justin Dietrich:And even on. I don't you know, the GoPro effect makes stuff look like kind of where it looks small, it's still legit. Is there a lot of exposure on it? Not a lot of exposure, but a lot of big rocks and a lot of rolls to Hux and there's a couple of like log jumps and it, and at the very, very end of it you're going into a drainage and there's a really big slab, cool, and it, it looks.
Josh:I'm not gonna let my, I'm not gonna let my wife listen to this episode.
Justin Dietrich:I would call that one pro-life like, not double black like beyond beyond beyond double black, we gotta go up there yep.
Josh:So yeah, dude, you should, you should. I'm gonna be up there with the fourth where you guys going somewhere I've ridden random little stuff up there, just Just nothing.
Dane:that big Schultz Creek I've rode all the way up.
Josh:Schultz turned around, came down Schultz, but there's like 50 trails that shoot off from there. I know they're all over, but they're not signed.
Dane:They're hard to figure out.
Justin Dietrich:They are signed.
Dane:No, not when I rode them.
Josh:So I haven't ridden in a long time. They've done a good job. The trails are all, yeah, um, they're signed really well.
Dane:Um, I think they did a lot after the fires and they just had a lot of money to go refurb and they've been able to do a lot more, and I just haven't been there since then. I mean, I last big trail that I did, there was wasabi and that's been washed out for years, yeah, so I mean, the only thing about up there I'll tell you is that, like everywhere, we rode fine like baby powder.
Justin Dietrich:Moon dust Like moon dust.
Josh:And I literally stopped. I know you're not supposed to do this, dan, you're not going to like this, but I stopped at the car wash every day.
Dane:Just spray your bike off. But I didn't use the high power. It hates you. I didn't use the. You know your bike hates you. It doesn't. It loves me it hates you.
Josh:It loves me forcing water, but I had to get that shit off.
Dane:I just want to let you know that next time you crash and you think it was just out of the blue for no reason, that's your bike telling me don't wash getting you back.
Josh:Yeah yeah, Dane hates it.
Justin Dietrich:So for international listeners it is so dry out here that literally you can go five years without replacing a bottom bracket or headset or hub bearings, suspension bearing Nothing, if you blow the grease out it's over. Yeah, like you got to build that little like dirt cake barrier and then you're gold for five years.
Dane:It's true, dead serious Now for all the PNW listeners they got to wash their bike.
Justin Dietrich:They do.
Dane:but they have to do bearings and all that, but we're just so spoiled here.
Justin Dietrich:Super spoiled.
Josh:When I see rusty bearings I'm like you are just.
Dane:you're just rusty bearings in Arizona, I mean even if you wash your bike too much, 15 minutes they're bone dry, Like how do they rust? No see, that's, that's common sense and it's bike sense. Bike sense is different because the water goes straight into the bearing and sits there. Okay, so big bear.
Josh:So where's big bear? At first of all, big bear's California.
Dane:It's up on the mountains above San Bernardino.
Justin Dietrich:I don't know what the San Bernardino is. It's right outside of Los Angeles. Yeah, like an hour.
Josh:Yeah, yeah, I think it's always an hour and 45 minutes east Cause I looked to fly into LAX and then drive up there.
Dane:Yeah, and it's this big lake which is awesome. That's up there, there's a whole city. That's one thing that I wanted to tell people, cause when we were switching from angel fire to big bear, tell that story.
Josh:Why did you switch from oh so?
Dane:the trip originally was going to angel fire and for a father's day trip and we had it all booked and set and their lifts broke. Their lifts broke so bad they had to get apart from Switzerland. And this part was multiple parts multiple, but these parts were so big that they had to be forklift into the back of a truck. They're like, we're not talking like tiny little things you know, or a computer board or anything like that, we're talking about huge. I saw that.
Josh:Tucker Tucker Van Ormer drove to Denver.
Justin Dietrich:Denver National Airport. Shout out to those lift was broken for like a week, yeah right when we were down right.
Dane:I mean, they don't have it up yet it's supposed to be this weekend, hopefully, yeah, so, yeah, um, so we switched to big bear and uh, a lot of people hadn't been there so we had to kind of let them know. And and big bear is a city like there's a schools, there's a zoo, there's a lake, there's a marina, there's uh cabins, there's three ski resorts, three or four, if I remember oh, wow, okay yeah, there's two that do bikes and I think a couple that just do ski and they have.
Dane:You know, it's a full on city. Like people live there year round.
Justin Dietrich:It's beautiful Pine trees, it's like 8,000 feet at the top. Yeah, Okay.
Josh:At the top of the resort, something like that, I can't remember, so I still was out of breath feet, yeah.
Dane:So, um, and then big bear was bought. I I don't know how, if they bought the mountain or if they just bought the business, or whatever, but uh, big bear mountain resorts now owns, I think, mammoth and snow summit and snow summit, by the way, used to be the mecca for downhill, like that was the place that everyone went we were at yeah, and we raced there like eight times a year, at times for the national races and all kinds of stuff. You know Sea Otter.
Josh:Yeah.
Dane:Before Sea Otter, everybody would show up to Big Bear and that was where the new products would be shown.
Josh:I think I remember this. This was like back in the 70s or something. No, god damn it, I love it 1912.
Dane:No, it was in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s.
Josh:Yeah, that's when you started Social Security.
Dane:Yes, exactly so that's when I retired, but anyway, so we hit Friday. We hit a place called Snow Valley I keep getting the names. It's a smaller mountain on the way and they actually open on Fridays from 1 to 7 at night, like at lights or something.
Josh:No, no, no, it's still, it's still light.
Dane:And, um, big bear mountain resorts, I believe, is what they are bought them. So we just found that out. So they're starting to revamp that mountain. That mountain's pretty dusty and sandy. We had a blast, we had a good time. Um, it's, there's building more and more trails. We're going to see that thing blow up.
Josh:It looks like there's a half a dozen trails or so.
Dane:Yeah, yeah, it was pretty fun and they have that hub, uh design. So you take the lift up and then they have certain hubs where you get together and then you get to pick two or three trails and that's becoming a big design. So, like you start a trail at the top, you may that has a hub and there's like three or four trails to choose. Then you ride down and then they all connect at the bottom and then you can pick three or four different trails so you can basically link different starts and ends and middles. So it's kind of cool right on, keeps it fresh.
Dane:So, uh, that was friday, that was a great, great trails and the fact that we could ride late, so it was good, yeah, and then the rest of the week.
Josh:so I mean, what were the trails like? Were they, you said, were sandy?
Dane:Super dusty, super dusty, but was it?
Josh:more flow, was it more tech?
Dane:Like what was it? Way more flow there, okay, way more, I would say, beginner-orientated there. Jumps are all tables Pretty easy. There's some drops. One of our guys crashed and almost broke his ribs.
Josh:Oh no.
Dane:So on one of the drops, a rock and it just drops and then you land into the sandy mess and it's just tire went out, so um so uh, pretty fun though, and they had some a jump line that was pretty big. There's only a couple guys hitting it and a couple drops, which was really cool. A little bit of natural terrain but really flowy big berms. You know, the flow trails at at mountain parks are at a higher speed, so the berms are really high it's really cool and so holding your line and making around as fast as you can is challenging.
Dane:It's fun. Some people again perspective. To me that's fun, that's easy, that's like green trail. But we have some riders with us that have never ridden those berms and they're not doing the speeds we are. And if you can't hit that berm at a certain speed you just fall down. It's like hitting, it's like going around a wall, like you're almost wall riding, and so you lose perspective that if a rider comes in slower, they can't hold it against that berm and they actually fall to the middle and they'll end up in the bottom, and the bottom is just basically marbles yeah, and we had one rider do that.
Dane:They fell down to the bottom, they started up on the thing and fell, just came in too slow, yeah, and didn't get hurt or anything. But it's like you forget, like because justin and I ride faster and we don't really think about it yeah we're like how could you not write a berm? It's like pavement, but it's pavement at a 45 degree you got twister hips, point your knees yep, oh yeah. Oh yeah, I don't know, I just go, yeah you just go.
Josh:It's I'm taking all these coaching sessions so I can get better right, so I know all the technique. But I watch you. I'm like that's not how you're supposed to ride.
Dane:And then I see you coming down so fast.
Josh:How the hell you do.
Justin Dietrich:No dropper, what the hell? Yeah. So this is what I told my son. My son doesn't ride a lot. Yeah, was he with you on this trip? Yeah, yeah 13, and he's a little 13, too.
Dane:He's under 100 pounds. He's a ripper man.
Justin Dietrich:He's like I don't know, 4'7". He's short.
Dane:Yeah.
Justin Dietrich:But he's got strength and he's got determination and the willingness to learn, and that's all it really takes right.
Josh:That's all you need, man, those three things.
Justin Dietrich:So the biggest thing was he saw Dane and I ripping around a corner. He's like I don't understand how you can go out of a corner that fast. And it's like if you have support like a berm, you have support, level pedals yeah, you don't have to drop an outside pedal, you don't have to deal with like the whole hip thing and all that kind of stuff. It's really not that necessary.
Josh:Yeah, now, it's not what my coach would say, justin.
Dane:I'm just telling Well, it depends on the berm, it depends on what you're riding.
Justin Dietrich:But if you're on prison camp and it's off-camber wackiness, you have no support. You better drop a pedal. You better point your hips, point your knees, get your weight over that foot, drive that front tire into the ground. It's a completely different technique.
Dane:I think I understand what you're saying there's kind of two cornering techniques that pop up and I feel like people get confused on when to use them.
Josh:Yeah, that would be me. So if you can, demystify that right now.
Dane:That would be awesome. So one is where you lean the bike and you keep your body up and that's weighting the outside pedal. And then the other one is when you lean with the bike.
Josh:But you have to have the speed and the support.
Dane:Yeah, the berm has to be your gravity is taking you towards the terrain. If the terrain isn't going to be there, if you slip, like if you, then you can't use that technique. You have to weight the outside, pedal and so, like off camber or even small berms, like at some of the smaller trails like Fantasy Island, you have to use that. Drop the bike. You know, weight the outside and keep your center of gravity over the tires that are in contact. But when you hit a berm, you're, you're cornering at the same angle as the bike. You don't drop the bike and you come around and that's where you see pictures of guys with their handlebars close to the ground. You know, like and stuff. It's because that berm is supporting them, otherwise they would go flying, flying over?
Josh:yeah, oh my god, did you see the guy at Leogang?
Dane:last week. Yeah, that ended up in the media.
Josh:I know we're not supposed to talk about downhill racing because everyone else does, but that was a crazy race.
Dane:It was cool because I think he landed it. He pretty much got over it.
Justin Dietrich:It looked like he launched and then landed on his bike and then just fell off.
Dane:He just bucked out the front. There it on his bike and then and then just fell off.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, bucked out the front. Yeah, yeah, there were people like parting of the red seas, come over the top of that giant wood wall.
Dane:Yeah, I've blown a berm and it's scary because you are going fast. I mean, we're hitting these things that I don't know what speeds we're doing because I don't use any uh metrics, but uh, probably 20 to 30 you use metrics?
Josh:what speeds are you doing when you hit those?
Justin Dietrich:It depends on the size of the berm and what leads into it. It's so variable. You can go out to the pump track and you can rip around that thing at an easy 10 to 15 mile an hour, which doesn't sound like a lot. You're pumping and humping and then you hit a corner.
Dane:That's got a radius of maybe 20 feet.
Josh:That's a tight term.
Justin Dietrich:It's so hard At the top of those berms at the pump track. It's 70 degrees. Yeah, it gets really tall.
Dane:Yeah.
Justin Dietrich:You can really lean into it and trust that it's going to hold Some of the big radius on Turtle we were just cooking through, yeah, at full speed. Turtle is where?
Dane:So at big bear, one of the, the one of the blues this is at snow summit.
Josh:Yes, no summit.
Dane:Yeah, we're going to talk about some of the snow summit, cause snow Valley was fun, but it's it's just like a one day park. Okay, you know? Uh, alleviate some of the lift lines.
Dane:Super popular Was it busy there, super popular on Saturday, yeah Uh, father's day was Sunday and it died. It was chill so yeah, and so it was pretty easy. We were just making it through the lift lines, but they kept the lift lines going. They have what? Three, no two bike racks. Yeah, it's two bike. It's kind of where you have a chairlift that holds four bikes. And at Snow Summit they only hold two.
Josh:Okay, so how long, like on the day that it was busy? How long were the lift lines at Snow Summit? Maybe five, ten?
Dane:minutes at the most.
Justin Dietrich:So when I first got there, I got there on Saturday, so these guys are all a day and a half ahead of me. I took, me and my son, about half day tickets 1230. It was like the meat of the day, yep. It was like the meat of the day, yep, and I think we. It was like 16 minutes for the lift line. It was the longest, yeah, and then and then there's that time up the lift, which I don't know.
Dane:Yeah, whatever 12 minutes, yeah 12 minutes.
Justin Dietrich:So um, but then, as the day wears on, people wear out and it thins out and it's not as bad.
Dane:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then so back to the trails. Turtle is one of the blues, there's a Going Green, which is one of their greens, and super easy Flow Trail forever, man, you feel like you're riding it forever. There's a little bit of berms. There's no baby berms, A little bit of baby berms. It's really like a green trail, beginner trail.
Josh:Beginner trail.
Dane:In fact one of our riders found a guy in the ditch there all bloodied up and he had crashed, which we were kind of. I mean I feel bad for the guy, but we were kind of joking that only the green trail would have a guy all blue. They took a picture of the blood. You know like there was legit blood.
Dane:Yeah, so, um, and then that was pretty boring. Most people can skip that. That's a good scenic route for for people that aren't going to a park. They're there because they're they're significant, want them to show like. I'm not doing that. Turtle is the first blue. That is pretty easy and it's all berms.
Justin Dietrich:It's a nice part about turtle is that you have berms to practice on, and the thing about bike parks versus just rail trail riding is you're going twice as fast everywhere. So going into the blue with no jumps, no drops, just berms that you can hold speed and have support used to and like up to speed and be like being okay, going that fast.
Dane:Yeah, it's good practice so you can get used to it. It's not scary. You know, there's a couple of jumps that are really low and nothing, nothing intimidating you know.
Josh:So, like, what's your, what's your, what's your normal trail speed at a bike park? Like, what are we talking about? Oh man, are you talking north of 20 miles an hour?
Justin Dietrich:probably. I would say like between 15 and 25, and maybe on some of the bigger hills, maybe faster than 25 yeah, like sunrise when we just go to the trails down the line we hit 40.
Dane:Um, but that's just an open. We're going straight down the ski run to get to the trails so we're just hauling. I know the pros are doing 30 to 40 on some of those sections, so it just depends on how fast you want to go. But their gravity, so you can pick up serious speed and you're not even pedaling. Gravity so you can pick up serious speed and you're not even pedaling. You know which is crazy? Like most of these trails, you don't even hardly need to pedal, like the gravity just takes you well, that's funny like you get on these giant wide.
Justin Dietrich:I mean these are big enough to fit a side by side, like they're wide trails yeah and you've got uh, so I'll pick and choose of your line. So, to speed, if you want to inside or outside and where you want you to support so you've got all this space. It's like driving have you ever driven in la in the middle of the night?
Justin Dietrich:oh yes, I have, and it's like eight lanes, yeah, and you're going 100 and it feels like you're going 12 yeah, that's how it is in a bike park, yeah so as soon as you get down and you're like riding down these things that are, you know, 10, 12, 16 feet wide and you're railing and you're going 30 mile an hour, it doesn't feel like 30. No, and then when you shoot off that trail and you go into single track, into the woods, you're instantly back down to 10 miles. Yeah, yeah, like you're like Holy cow.
Dane:I'm going to feel like you know, on a speeder bike and star Wars, you know, going through the woods Like it's crazy set of pads in one day.
Josh:I'm a heavy rider.
Justin Dietrich:I could see that, like your Angel Fire, where it's steep, especially right out of the gate.
Josh:So is Big Bear as steep as Angel Fire, or is it comparable?
Dane:It's weird because I would say Big Bear is older and as big, maybe not quite as tall, but it doesn't have nearly as many trails Angel Fire's got like 70 trails They've got everybody beat on the amount of trails they have.
Justin Dietrich:Angel Fire's 1,200 feet or 2,500 feet every lift, I don't know.
Dane:It's a lot.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, it's a lot, it's a steep.
Dane:It's a big and it's steeper, so Big Bear, you know, just is spread out, which is nice. They've got a lot of room they could put in trails like crazy if they wanted to.
Josh:I think they have to battle the forest service a little bit, yeah, where angel fire is all privately owned, so they can go out that day and build whatever they want.
Dane:Yeah, they're like, oh, let's do a trail, and they do it that day we have.
Josh:I mean just for our listeners. We got a great episode on on angel fire. I'll put a link in the show notes we had the bike park manager, patrick west, and patrick paranormal, who does all the builds, all the trails. We had to pull those guys on.
Dane:So one thing that's nice is, as you go to different parks, you kind of get a feel for, like, the quality in the builds and how they're doing them and what they're taking into account. So I'll give you an example Bean Peak. I had a great time. It's awesome for Arizona.
Josh:There are some some things that they Lacey said that too, that some of the design wasn't as great they just need to work.
Dane:There's one jump that takes you straight into a berm and off of it. You know if you hit it big and there's a couple berms. Uh, at purgatory there's a couple berms that change radius in the middle and that's really unsettling when you're going around a berm and all of a sudden the radius gets steeper.
Josh:Yeah, it's tighter, you can pop you.
Dane:It can pop you right off the berm and, uh, I can say that big bears were built amazing. They did a great job on on their trail building. I don't know how much maintenance they do, but every time I go there by the end of the weekend there's a bunch of braking bumps that show up in these trails where you jam the brakes on to make a corner and then the next year or whatever. When I show up, they they're not there.
Justin Dietrich:And then they show up again.
Josh:They must be. They must be at least yearly.
Dane:Yeah, and I think angel fire does good maintenance, but it's like on the yearly instead of the weekendly, and so if you go late in the season at angel fire you'll see a lot more breaking bumps. It gets super rough. So we're going in August and we'll see see how it is. Usually we plan angel fire early because we know that the trails are more maintained and fresher and smoother, cause I literally get worn out riding angel fire, cause the breaking bumps my arms will start to fall off.
Justin Dietrich:Angel fires in that that mountain corridor of every afternoon. It's lightning show too. Yeah, so you never know, once you get into july and august, it's like it's almost a guarantee they're gonna have lightning yeah, yeah, that's something I bring my e-bike next time so I can ride up the because the new trail goes, enlightenment goes all the way to the top.
Josh:Now, I didn't used to.
Dane:Yeah, they just they just changed that last year. So, um, big bear, uh, probably six to eight runs, so they have like at least a dozen. No, no, I'm talking about um type named runs so yeah there's uh three or four, there's two different lifts, there's three, there's two or three at one lift and then you go traverse across to the other lift and there's like two or three and then they have uh. So those are hubs, and then they have a central hub, uh, where they kind of join and you can crisscross and then, you can connect them.
Dane:So you can basically do Westridge to Turtle out, or we were doing Blue Steel to Miracle and out Miracle, or you can connect the fronts and the ends and mix it up. My favorite was Blue Steel by far. So Blue Steel is a jump line. Uh, tons of jumps. It just starts right off the bat in all these jumps, but they're not too big. They're not so big that they're freaky yeah and they're pretty small and they're easy are they tables or gaps tables?
Justin Dietrich:yeah, I'd say like between four, like maybe three and eight feet yeah, like on the big end yeah, it'd be.
Dane:What's the big one at the bottom?
Josh:when you say eight feet, you're talking about not the height, but the height, the height.
Justin Dietrich:So 8 sounds like a lot but it's really not too bad and a lot of those tables have a bigger option. So you go in and you might have like a 5-foot on one side and a 7-foot on another because it's just got an extra 2 feet of lip.
Josh:Yeah, They'll put a high lip on them.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, so, um. So, once you go through it and they progressively get bigger and then some of them are longer. So there's one, there's like the double hip right, so there's a cool hip that's got a small hip, and then you go down around the corner, you hit a second hip and that one's got a big option. Yeah, the table. That's right. After that, if you come off that big hip, like I was doing, you can send that to flat.
Josh:Yeah, you got to be careful. Yeah, you're going too fast here.
Justin Dietrich:And then that last one that you were talking about yeah, the big table, it's not necessarily super big, like it might only be a six to eight footer, but it's really long, yeah, so you have to have a lot of speed to make it to the transition.
Dane:And so blue steel was probably my favorite because if you're not a jumper it'll help you learn like for sure. You know it's not super consequences. The jumps weren't so big or scary. The lips there's a couple steep ones that you get to that are a little intimidating, but you can kind of see over them so you're not freaking out. Then we hit party wave. So party wave is the big jump line and that's got wood features, wood wall rides, um, and some a little bit of tech. There's one rock jump that you can go over that it looks like some people do because there's tire tracks, but most of us went around it and big hips and then big ass jumps like so big, like 10, 15 feet high.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, there's a couple. A couple of them are like candy there's, there's like one that's in there, that's.
Josh:I would compare to candy land at angel fire yeah, that's the line that my son went down and hit everything. Yeah, like first candy land's got some big.
Justin Dietrich:Well, they're not like long tables, they're just really tall, really tall, and sharp lips like just straight up you can't see what's yeah and there's one that I slowed down on because I can see it.
Dane:I'm coming down a hill towards it. It looks big and it's far away. And then, as I get to the bottom and I'm picking up speed to start going up, it's so huge that I'm like I'm just going to go into space when I hit this thing. And I jam on the brakes, you know, as I'm coming up to, it because I don't want to go into space.
Dane:And justin and devon, they're right behind me, almost, almost run right into me because I'm slowing down, because I'm just gonna pop on top instead of trying to clear it, and they're big for sure.
Justin Dietrich:I was gonna like jump onto devon's back like I was hard on the binders dude hard, it's true and that's what's cool.
Dane:We took devon. He started off on first day. He's an enduro racer but he started off first day kind of hitting stuff and learning and doing okay. By the end of it he was hitting big stuff on party wave. So it's, that's what's cool about the bike progression you learn and you get better and better because you're doing run after run and you get to practice and it's it's really cool and you're not getting wiped out from climbing up the hill.
Dane:No, and then the one trail that we did we all did like once or maybe twice is 10 ply, yeah, and that's the most technical natural terrain. They've got doubles with gaps.
Justin Dietrich:That's where they race.
Dane:Yeah, and it's takes you through these wood sections that are stupid steep and I did a GoPro video and I'm like you can't tell how steep it is, but you can see the rocks, like you can see. It's just a field of rocks and there's no clear line and you're just bombing through this thing and trying to figure out how not to flip over because you're at a 45. Uh, what is this? 45?
Dane:degree you're at a 40, it's steep it's steep and you're, you're going through a rock garden and it's powdery, you know and through the trees, and then you're navigating trees, corners and all this stuff and so, and then you end up we call it the caterpillar rock, so it's a stack of rocks that that goes down, that you can get onto, and then you have to drop off over a tree under. Uh, when you get to the end of it, these are all sort of like, like trash can, sized I don't know three four foot around.
Josh:Oh Jesus, yeah, yeah.
Justin Dietrich:And there's probably 10 of them and they're in a line. Yeah, oh, perfect, yeah, yeah, it looks like a caterpillar and it goes, you know, 30 degrees down or whatever. Yeah, so you just skip over the top of them.
Dane:Yeah To a steep landing.
Josh:So that sounds no fun.
Dane:It's, it's. That's the no joke trail, that's the natural. And so what's funny is that's what we're used to in riding in Tucson and riding in Arizona, like we're used to those rocks, that steep and just nastiness. That's what we're used to. The rest of the park is cake.
Justin Dietrich:The 10 ply is pretty hard and uh hard and uh we go, we go through it like nothing, I. So I only did it once. I did it one like once last year in this year. That was when my son went with another guy to a different, which to me makes me nervous, right, because he's only 13, he's super bikey and I'm like he'll be okay, he's with a good guy, yeah. But we, we went and I, dane, went out front. He's like I'm not doing these doubles. He kind of killed my speed.
Dane:I'm like get out of the way. There's a video I put up and you can hear him going get out of the way I'm like go around me. I'm not doing these but then you get to the tech part and I was like you just let go of the brakes. Yeah, and I just went.
Justin Dietrich:I was like yep, he was just gone and I was like I got to the bottom of that little section and I'm like I'm just going to keep going like Forrest Gump. So I just went down through the whole thing. Did the Caterpillar didn't slow down, my GoPro stopped like midway somewhere I ran out of battery. It was like my only, even though it was blind.
Dane:Yeah. It was kind of I felt like let the brakes go and just let it eat, like I would back at home and it's super cool. Keep in mind you're you're on a can feel one. Yeah, I was on a downhill bike. Yeah, and I'm on my trail bike. Well, my, my enduro, light enduro bike.
Josh:That's a good question. So I was going to ask like what? What are the recommended bike? Like what are the recommended bike frames you would consider. Well, honestly, we saw everything.
Dane:Like I mean, we saw. So my buddy from dvo, bobby, showed up. Yep and uh, I'm, I'm on the lift and I see a DVO green fork on the trail and I'm like, oh, there's a DVO. I noticed Cause I liked DVO, and I'm like, oh, that guy's riding DVO, he's gotta be cool. And then I look and it's a hard tail. I'm like that guy's gotta be crazy. That guy is a crazy nutcase, you know riding a hard tail on these trails, you know. And then we get to the top and we're hanging out waiting to do blue steel and I hear this, I hear this dane, and I turn around and it's him, and it's bobby from dvo, and he's like what's up?
Dane:man, I'm like you are crazy for riding that bike and so what was his explanation or rationale? He's a cross-country guy with a side of enduro and there's a endurance. He's more of an endurance rider right and there's an endurance race that he was doing and so he was just up there having fun and it's funny because talking to him is pretty fun, because he's noticing everybody. He noticed justin had a dvo on his, he noticed my bike, you know, and he's like how come the rest of your buddies don't have dv? It's?
Josh:like I'm working on them, give me, give me, give me a chance. So you ask like what bikes? Yeah, what bike would you recommend?
Justin Dietrich:um looking at what's there and what the locals were there on yeah, it's absolutely just full of trail bikes and, and I would say 150, 150 170 bikes yeah, okay with maybe not even 10 were downhill bikes, yeah and there was like maybe 10 on the bottom end that were like XC, ish hard tail.
Dane:Yeah, there were the weird old people some people bring people bikes.
Josh:Yeah, yeah, run what you brought Lots of e-bikes, man there was a lot of e-bikes. Okay, yeah, it was. I'm actually thinking about bringing my altitude to the angel fire.
Dane:I was kind of. I was kind of like why are they bringing them? And then I have to realize people don't all have six bikes you know so they may just have one, but, um, one of my old team members was there, Moses, and he has.
Josh:He had an e-bike, I don't remember which, I think it's an Orbea but it was same weight as my old downhill bike, you know, and I just send it and I'm like, okay, he's not, he's not wrong, I can't jump that altitude at all.
Dane:I think weighs like 70, you will if you, when you go to the bike parts, you know you got a power play. Yeah, he's got the same color, I think, but you but I have a aluminum and he's got aluminum.
Josh:Oh, dude, you've got a 56. Yeah, mine's like 68. How is that possible?
Justin Dietrich:maybe because you're just way taller than me? I don don't know. I don't know. Did you put it is an extra large? I did not. All right.
Josh:So, two more questions and we'll close out. Okay, um brakes, oh yeah, what do?
Dane:you recommend for brakes? Oh, so we even talked about that. So I took my e-bike as a backup and I actually blew a tire and had to use the, the rear brake or the rear wheel. Um, but I started because I put those lightweight cross-country brakes on my e-bike. That sounds dumb to make it lighter and I actually refused to ride it because it's like you need brakes because so four piston, so some type of four piston yeah, you really do you need like.
Dane:I had one. I think I rear 180 and one 203 on mine. Yeah, and I'm a light breaker. I don't use my brakes too much. I kind of drag them all the time, so I don't jam them on at the last minute.
Josh:Justin's over here shaking his head.
Dane:He knows, he knows I go faster if I'd let go of my brakes.
Justin Dietrich:But the brake thing is, it's super subjective and and you get, the biggest thing for me is if you're a brake dragger you need to dissipate heat. Yeah, and that comes out of the big rotor. Yeah, On my altitude and my element I run 180. And I've never been to the point to where I'm like I kind of wish I had more.
Josh:And what do you weigh?
Justin Dietrich:like 200 pounds maybe yeah, so on my e-bike I got 203s and on the Canfield I have 203s and they, so on my e-bike I got two or threes, and on the Canfield I have two or threes and that, and they're talking about rotor size, by the way, just for just because I end up going faster. The e-bike sure, it weighs 20 pounds more than a standard bike, but you know if I weighed 220 pounds, me and a standard bike.
Dane:with this, the same so it's all relative and it also e-bikes at the heavier weight grip longer before they break traction.
Justin Dietrich:So your brakes actually are more effective, and with e-bike the average speed is up though Really. Yeah because you've got power. Yeah.
Josh:I mean actually the lady from People for Bikes told us in our little e-bike meeting that the average speed for an e-bike is like three miles per hour, less than a regular bike across all the trails in the United States. Really, miles per hour less than a regular bike across all the trails in the United States. So really.
Justin Dietrich:So I'm trying to.
Josh:The only thing I can figure about is that it's there's a lot of older people riding e-bikes and they might just be riding slower, I can't, I can't descend as fast on my e-bike. I can't ride my e-bike as fast as my mom.
Dane:Now I have to. I have to qualify that on my lightweight e-bike that's just a regular, it's a regular bike. I can do that, but on my big rocky I cannot go as fast um. I haven't tried that at a bike park yet, um, but like on regular trail, it's just too big and I go much faster on my l.
Josh:You didn't bring the norco out there I did.
Dane:That's the one I brought, but I have those new hope brakes that are the lightest brakes on the market and I was gonna ride it just to try it and I just got too lazy, but I didn't need it. You know you don't need an e-bike at all. Yeah, and honestly, I just brought it for spare parts which I needed.
Josh:So okay, so final question tires. Oh God, I found out so like I'm doing the standard like DHF, dhr.
Justin Dietrich:You're talking to a tire popper over here. Yeah, you're talking to a tire popper over here. Yeah, I'm playing it, dang, I want to hear.
Josh:I want to hear cause, like Lacey, wants to try something different and she's thinking about the agaros but you kind of sent me a weird text with words that I didn't understand. Oh, it was probably talk to Ted. It definitely was talk to.
Dane:Ted, so uh, that, so the on that. I had like probably 40 pounds of PSI in my tires, like it's a hell. Why would you run that?
Josh:Because it's like pavement, you don't need traction.
Dane:Like you don't need a low pressure. Um, in fact it works against you and you're going so fast. When you do hit a rock, it's compressing the tires so much that you don't want to run low pressure at a bike park. Uh but uh, I ended up cutting my agarro like a brand new set on and I cut my rear tire in like what I thought was sand, and I was just pissed off Like you wouldn't believe.
Josh:And do you any of you cut those multiple times?
Dane:Yes, and so, uh, I went. I went to Moab, I rode down, uh, we did um whole enchilada and I rode down and I really coined that up to you. Change in elevation as you drop a lot of elevation in a long ride, your tire gets softer. And I just thought I just got a soft tire and I just pinch flatted it, and so this is the third one. At South Mountain I got another flat. Now I got to tell you I love this tire. It's fast, it corners, awesome, it's got great tread.
Josh:You love all the performance, the performance, but it's failing you three times.
Dane:I think there's something wrong.
Josh:Is there a different casing that you could be using?
Dane:I think they're going to make an Enduro. I have to check because, as somebody who sells these, I'm kind of ticked at the tire. I actually ordered some. You remember when I was dogging on the Forecasters? Yeah, I had misdiagnosed which tire it was. It was Medusa's that I was telling people they were stupid for getting in Arizona Because that's what Maxxis used to call their mud tire. And so I actually looked at them, forecasters, and we ordered some. I'm going to try some and give them a shot. The Agero, I think, is a faster, more versatile tire.
Dane:That's a Vittoria right, yeah, that's a Vittoria. Right, yeah, that's a vittoria. But I'm not really sure what's going on, and last year I rode the crypt totals, which I hated top to continental.
Josh:I mean just pretty much universal hatred for the continental line super heavy yeah so.
Dane:So let me qualify my hatred. I hated them on my super light, 27 pound enduro bike that I can ride as a cross-country bike, because it made it feel like a downhill bike at the bike park. They were fine, like I didn't have any problems at the bike park, so I don't think there are a bad tire when you're not worried about the bike feeling, you know, sluggish, um. So this year I went with the agueros because I wanted to keep my bike light and fast and nimble for most of my riding. The bike parks only one percent, two percent of my riding yeah, so, uh, so yeah, I'm struggling with them, trying to figure out what's going on. The martello is probably one of the best park tires you can get that's also that's vittoria, it's a tighter um.
Dane:It's not super mud shedding, but it's a tighter uh. Blocks their corner. Awesome, super fast, really durable. And you can get that in the enduro casing, which is double strong. And then the maza is their other one. So those are my combo. Right now I'm going to put on my downhill bike.
Josh:So you're digging the vittoria right now, besides the fact that the cigarro keeps feeling you yeah, and it's not that I don't like maxis, uh, you're just trying to be different with.
Dane:I think so honestly like I, I honestly kind of buck that punk rock well, it's like automatically, there's Maxis everywhere and everybody's like Maxis, maxis, maxis.
Josh:Shouldn't you run those V tires if you're going to be really punk rock? No, oh my.
Justin Dietrich:God Sketch.
Dane:The Indian. The Indian V tires. One of our listeners shout out to Mike Jones, he rides a tire.
Justin Dietrich:Mike Jones.
Dane:Yeah.
Josh:He, he likes it because it's a v-tire.
Justin Dietrich:No, what are?
Dane:they uh versus and they make them in colors and they match his bike. He's named his bike sharon, so shout out to sharon. She has her own instagram page and, um, I'm not kidding sharon, the mountain bike. Go look it up, uh. But uh, he's, he gets his tires and he likes them. He said that he likes the performance. In fact, I think he's riding black now because they didn't have the color. Uh, so they're versus? I'm not sure. I haven't really gotten into them.
Josh:We could do a whole episode just on tires.
Justin Dietrich:But like what do you run at the bike park? Just like what did you run this weekend.
Josh:I didn't do anything different because Well, what is it that you do? Normally, I run Martell's on everything I own.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, every once in a while I might go Maz Mazda on the front because it's got a little bit different grip characteristic If I'm looking for a little bit to push past thicker sand or so the big thing out here in Arizona and actually like out in the Southwest, everything that I've ridden is basically loose over hard.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, and so you don't have a big enough tread to push through the loose to get to the hard, then you're sliding, yeah. And so if you have something that's got a little bit taller of a knob, the Martello and the Mazda and the Agaro work, the DHF works. But you start getting the DHRs and the high roller and the DHF and especially like the Assegai they don't roll, worth a crap.
Dane:Yeah, they're slower. They're really downhill tires unless you're just willing to deal with it. They're good tires for all those people that just got mad that I say they're slower If you're just willing to deal with it.
Justin Dietrich:But I mean, if you only ride DHF and DHRs, you don't know anything different. Like when I put God, what does that do? It's a Mescal, a Vittoria Mescal, oh my. God, that's super fast the race version, mezcal, and I kid you not, the whole wheel set with tires was 2,400 grams Like super light, super light. And that bike it was on my Element and it weighed just under 25 pounds and that thing is a rocket.
Dane:They're like 600 gram tires. They're so light, it's so fast and that thing is a rocket.
Justin Dietrich:They're like 600 gram tires. They're so light, it's so fast, it's so noticeable.
Josh:And you're not. You're not you're not.
Justin Dietrich:You're not flatten them or rip them or anything. No, I just run them up to like 28, 30 PSI just to be safe. Yeah.
Dane:We sell those for like um Leadville, dirt roads, things like that.
Justin Dietrich:It's a gravel tire. Yeah, it's almost a gravel tire, like they're 2.1s.
Dane:We don't even sell. We have one set here just for those race bikes. And we tell people when they buy them, this is a race day, only tire because they don't have the flat protection. That's for the race version, the XC I think XC race is what they call them. And then they have a trail version that has protection and they're low tread, fast that. And then they have a trail version that has protection and they're low tread fast. That's Victoria's answer to I don't know. Icon Maxxis Icon.
Justin Dietrich:Or Recon. So I think when you go to a bike park or any place where the trail speed's up, you just run a little bit extra pressure. That because you need the support from the sidewalls, unless you're running like a downhill casing or something crazy.
Dane:Were you running inserts.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, I run inserts.
Dane:I didn't have any inserts.
Justin Dietrich:I might not in the future. I don't know if it's necessary at this point. I think the tire have changed over the last few years.
Josh:They're way more durable.
Dane:So I feel like inserts at bootleg make more sense. But at the bike part it's like riding a sidewalk. It's not nearly as rough as our normal terrain yeah and so I don't think you need the extra centrifugal.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah so it's not like you need to go to a bike park and you think, oh, automatically, I'm going downhill, I need to put new tires on it. They need to be downhill casing and they need to be, you know, acid guys and high roller twos or dhr rears like not happening, not necessarily just ride what you have.
Dane:And of course, we got to define that bike park. The ones that we've been talking about that are just really machine built, really smooth, like jump line different than like natural trail yeah, like when we go to bootleg, that's not the case. There's no machine built anything out there, and then I'm sure, in other bike parks I'm trying to think so. A lot of the purgatory was machine built. Telluride was machine built, so a lot of the ones we've talked about are not. You don't need a super chunky tire until you hit those natural terrain.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, you get those downhill tracks, yeah, yeah right on.
Josh:So all right, guys, you guys got any final thoughts for our listeners here uh, let's see ride.
Dane:I feel. I feel like I got new people into bikes, did you? Yeah, but we got. We lost one, so how'd you lose one? So Bev brought her kids uh, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend up to big bear with us and stayed with us and she brought bikes for them and she took a tumble and she's like I think she's going to swear off her daughter, yeah. Yeah, bev's hardcore, um, but I think her daughter's swearing off so.
Josh:I think we may have lost. That's a good reminder for our listeners. So we've challenged y'all and I have, I think, five.
Dane:Justin brought his kid.
Josh:That's good, that's good, so we're challenging y'all to identify someone who's not an avid mountain biker and try to get them hooked on the sport and you know do things. I loaned a buddy of mine's friend my bike this weekend up in Flagstaff and said, go take it. And he was like, really, I'm like, yeah, just go take it and ride it. And he came back and I've probably gotten 50 texts from him on different bikes that he's looking at since then. So yeah, it's awesome to get someone hooked. That's awesome, All right. Well, thanks for coming and spending some time with us Appreciate that.
Justin Dietrich:Yeah, I mean, there's so many cool trails in the Southwest and all over the world. It'll be real neat to see where where the trail conversation can proceed. Yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to it All right, guys Take care, thank you.