Yannick and like randomly going for mission rides. Seems like every time we do, the weather decides to turn and it rains a bit and makes the journey that much more interesting! This week in preparation for our MOMAR and Sufferfest weekends coming up we decided to get in a long midweek ride. Due to waning light I left work early and we left the Crawford parking lot at 4 pm. We rode up the easy way taking lost lake and pink highway up to Wayne's Bench. From there we rode up Crawford Trail to the KVR which was a surprising amount of extra vert and super pumpy! After a short ride on the KVR we started on Upper Crawford Trail.
Poor start. Super loose sand. Essentially a really steep sandy 300 m hike a bike. We weren't sure where it would go from there but luckily it mellowed out and we were again climbing some nice single and double track. We quickly got the the scout camp and took a moment to look around and eat some bars. From there the climbing got tricky. Super gully riverbed style climbing with large exposed boulders that bounced you around. The tactic was to build up speed and just keep powering until you finally got bucked off your bike. Several hike a bike sections and restarts later we finally got back on some reasonable trail to climb. By this point the temperature was dropping as we had already gained over 1000 m since the car and essentially 1300 above town. The light was disappearing quickly so we set a time limit of 7 pm to turn around. The last ten to fifteen minutes of climbing was on an old road which we covered fairly quickly and we were psyched to realise we were at the base of Little White! Unfortunately it was exactly 7 and will our tiny Black Diamond headlamps it was going to be a long ride down. We put on all of our layers as it was cold up there (minus the gloves I forgot and cursed the whole way down barely able to hold my brakes!). Top elevation reached was 1900 m. It was too bad we didn't have some more time because I think it would have been less than an hour to the top. Another day!
Ride down was uneventful. Some fast fun flowy sections, bouncy creek bed which wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it might have been, and some slow riding down the Crawford trails in the pitch black! Definitely another good time!
Here is Yannick's Garmin file.
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