Horses, hills and headaches.

Went out to Pleasant Creek State Park today to do their 15 mile multi use trail. Multi use means that snowmobiles, hikers, bikers, walkers, horses, etc all use the same trail. And you can tell. That thing was ripped up. It's obvious it wasn't setup for bikers exclusively. Horses and snowmobiles do serious damage to the trail, (not to mention horse crap all over the place) and some of the ups and downs on the hills were way too steep for people to make it up them over and over and over (obviously not designed for people power to move people up and down the hills). But going down of them was kind of fun.

I did a lot of walking up hills today. And 15 miles is way too long. The trail is a loop so once you start you pretty much have to finish. And after all the pounding you take from the really rough torn up trail your arm are ready to fall off. I know mine are. I ran out of water too which always stinks.

On the cool side, some of the downhills had some sweet jumps on them. The jumps were mainly there because of wash out from water running down the hills. (They didn't do any switchbacks or anything so water just ran straight down the hills) But they were certainly fun to clear. I was getting enough air that I could feel the bike shudder when I landed. Sweet!

Unfortunately, most of the time the uphill after a downhill was walked by me. Somewhat because I was tired, somewhat because the path was so rutted and washed out I couldn't get any traction and momentum up to get up the hill and somewhat because they were way too steep.

I think this park could have some fantastic mtn bike trails, if they wanted to portion off a section of them to just be for mtn bikes. They have a lot of great hills that would be a blast if you had switchbacks cut into them and were able to weave your way back and forth. Not to mention that you would be able to have a lot of trails since they have 15 miles already. Just cut a chunk out of that 15 and you could have some really good riding. Probably will never happen.

I'm tired. I'm out.
FGLB