Brian Head!

Brian Head, Utah is a pretty bitchin' place. It's not huge, and it's not your classic overdeveloped ski town, but it's pretty frickin' amazing. Two ridiculous words ending with in' in my first two sentences. That's how you tell I had a good weekend. The boys and I - the boys in this case being Russell, Rob, Cy and Chris - got into Brian Head EARLY on Friday morning... like 3am early. It hurt, but we still managed to get our butt's out of bed by around 9 and were out at the bike park before noon on Friday. The plan was to bike until around 4 and then shuttle Dark Hollow (14 mile downhill, sweet!). But perhaps due to the lack of sleep the night before and for me in part due to 2 spectacular falls whereby I learned the true purpose of body armor, by the time we were done with the bike park we were too tired and there was too little daylight left for a long shuttle. The bike park was plenty anyway.


I will say this about Brian Head, it is not an easy hill to ride. I'm sure that there are trails that we didn't ride, that are more geared towards xc that are more mellow, but of the ones we rode, even the easiest had some pretty intense sections that I would not want to take a beginner on. Super fun though! By far, my favorite was Timberline. Fast, flowy, drops, jumps, rocks, logs... could you really ask for more? The 2 DH race courses (I forget their names, wildflower and something else), were also fun but also really hard on my body. Lots of large loose rocks on super steep terrain. I liked the challenge, but couldn't do many runs on them without my arms getting sore. I'm also not 100% sure I could have ridden all of the course, since I definitely took a few go-rounds that I'm not sure would be there on race day, and as mentioned above, I had two spectacular ass over tea kettle falls on wildflower. Friday was pretty much get to know the hill day. I eyed up a lot of the big ticket elements that day, but didn't get the nerve to hit any of them. I did figure out how to get over to the teeter totter/bridge area and gave that a shot. Pretty fun. Turns out I like bridges now, even though they still scare me.

The day flew by and before we knew it we were sitting down to pizza and beer at piazano's pizza. After food and beer, we had a little scenic tour of Cedar Breaks and Brian Head Summit where I proved I had "more balls" than any of the guys by standing on a rock that was wedged between 2 other rocks hanging out over a cliff. A quick soak in the burning hot hot tub and a dip in the pool to ease our flaming skin, and we hit the hay, dreams of singletrack and big drops filing our heads.


Day 2 started out with a shuttle run of Dark Hollow. Our shuttle driver was from Winnipeg and called me out for saying "washroom" instead of "restroom". Dark Hollow is pretty fantastic. It starts with a bit of a climb and then drops into probably a 5-10 mile stretch of technical downhill singletrack weaving between trees and rocks. I have to say, trying to keep up with the guys on this gave me less time to look around and enjoy my surroundings, as they were just bombing through it, but it was really fun to go fast and "just go for it" over some stuff in an effort to make it so they didn't have to wait for me. Eventually you are dumped out onto a fire road, which is also pretty fun to bomb down with some wall rides and epic scenery thrown in. Our shuttle driver picked us up at the bottom and drove us back up to the bike park where we spent the rest of the afternoon. Time to give those drops and jumps that I didn't do on Friday a shot. Saturday was definitely a more successful day than Friday, no falls and I hit everything I wanted to try. I was really happy with myself having done the drop at the top of Timberline and the 5+ ft drop at the bottom. Both of these were pretty scary to me the first time and definitely bigger than anything I've ever done before, but by the time Saturday was over I was feeling a lot more confident on both. I just keep smiling when I think about it. Just when I thought I was awesome, Rob showed us all up by doubling a jump that was so big I didn't even really realize it was a double. That guy goes huge. Maybe Russell and I will get there someday?? Maybe he just has no self preservation instinct... I dunno. Rob, Chris and Cy took off at around 4:30pm... I think they stopped in Virgin and rode Grafton Mesa on the way home. Russell and I once again took a dip in the pool/hot tub and relaxed for the evening.


Sunday was photo shoot day!! We pretty much just rode all the cool stuff a bunch of times and took pictures/video. My arms were starting to kill me and I think Russell was getting tired too, so we called it quits at around 2pm and went back to the condo to shower and pack up before heading home. Another GREAT weekend almost complete. I say almost because we took the scenic route back to the 15 from Brian Head and got to see some pretty cool scenery. Another great weekend completely complete after a 7 hr drive home....