Yesterday, a few friends and I and took the forty minute drive to Squamish to do some shuttling. They had been there before, but my brother and I never have. We met up with some other people from Whistler and started driving up the road past Quest University.
It was about 10 minutes to the top of the our warm up run called Cake Walk. It was a nice easy technical run with a couple drops and jumps. Some parts of the trail didn’t drain well and there was quite a lot of water, but for the most part, the conditions were good.
After dumping out of Cake Walk, we made the 8-10 minute hike to Full Nelson, a trail used in the film Strength In Numbers. That was probably my favorite overall run of the day, even though we only did it once. It was smooth and had lots of good berms and jumps. I did find that you really had to keep your speed up or you’d have to pedal to keep a good flow, which didn’t happen because there were four people ahead of me and only one of them had ever ridden that trail. Full Nelson dumped right into Half Nelson which was pretty much just a smaller version of Full Nelson, hence the name. That dumped us out onto a parking lot about a third up the mountain.
We shuttled the bumpy road all the way to the top to get to a trail called Grin and Holler. About 500 Meters from the trailhead, we hit snow. I had never ridden in the snow on my DH bike so I was kind of excited. We pushed up to the trail and found that it had been ridden a little bit so at least we could see where we were suppose to go. It was quite steep and technical and me being new to clipless shoes didn’t help much. The trail had two mandatory high skinnies that you couldn’t ride around, one of which I fell off (walking it). After that, the trail seemed to get easier and less steep.
Right at the end of the trail was the best part of my day. Big manmade jumps. There were four wooden lipped gaps that I couldn’t wait to put my tires on them. After walking down and looking at all of them, the only one I was really worried about was the first one because it had a wood landing which was almost as high as the take off. First jump was about 15-18 feet, second was about 22′ third was at least 27′ and the last one, depending where you landed was 35+. I dropped in, hitting all of them the first go, which I didn’t think I’d do, but the jumps were built perfectly and judging the speed was easy. I overshot the last one by quite a bit, but It wasn’t a big deal because the landing was so long. Only three out of the six of us did them and we pushed back up three more times because they were so much fun.
The last trail of the day we decided to do all of Half Nelson because we had only done half of it when we did Full Nelson. The top half of the trail is pretty much the same as the bottom. The top was a little more technical, but it turned into smooth flowy goodness real fast. Again, I was behind two people, so I couldn’t go as fast and keep a good flow going. You’d think I would have learned by now, eh? Everybody was too tired to do another run, so we rode down the road back to Squamish. It wasn’t as steep as we had thought so we actually did a lot of pedaling (oops).
The thing I learned about riding Squamish is that you’re going to have to hike up no matter what trail you do, so if you’re used to riding park, you’re not gonna like it. It is DEFINITELY worth the hike, though. Just make sure to bring lots of water.
Last jump on Grin And Holler. It’s a biggie!
