Friday, June 22, 2007

More Randomness from Canuckistan

Thursday we hiked up Sulphur Mountain to the top of the Banff gondola and weather station. We'd heard if you hike up you can ride down for free. So, we did the 5ish mile hike in 2 hours. We ran a pretty good pace the whole way.


However, it was no longer free to ride down but $12.50. Yikes! We once again bent over and gave it up to the tourist machine, because I didn't want to hike down for 2.5 hours (I am always slower down than up and it hurts my feet).



Today, we rented mountain bikes and did a 15km off road trail loop. Most of it was non-technical, but there were a couple challenging sections with whooptie-do river crossings. Then we did a mostly road but some trail loop around the Banff Springs golf course looking for elk. I did my first drop-off. It was about 5 feet and not completely vertical. I didn't really see it coming. I just came over a rise and realized I had to drop down a rock face. I didn't have time to chicken out. So, I just angled the bike and stuck my butt out and survived. Yay me!

5 comments:

Chris said...

Gorgeous pictures.

Kimberly (aka. DrKim) said...

cool! Sounds like you're having a fun vacation. Awesome...enjoy it!
I had a 40K TT today..not so awesome, but I did get a medal!

chatterbox said...

Chris and Kim - Thanks!

Kim, great job on the TT. Congrats on the podium!

Lorri Lee Lown -- velogirl said...

you rode a 5 foot drop-off? no way! I can't ride a 5-foot drop-off! I think I should retire.

chatterbox said...

VG - the key was that I didn't mean to ride off it (plus, like I said, it wasn't pure vertical, so my back tire was able to maintain contact with the rock on the way down instead of complete airborne). It's amazing what your mind and body can overcome before your self preservation engine has a chance to kick in!

No way am I doing that again on purpose!