middlefork!

Everything you've ever heard about middlefork, it's true. Definitely one of the most badass places I've ever ridden.

Most of our camp/ride weekend ended up being a wash-out :/

Thursday night we had a little shower move through, nothing too bad, just a few sprinkles. We arose at 6:30 am Friday morning, ughhh, and chilled around and made some breakfast for a couple hours. By 9:00 am we were off to ride from the Council Bluffs campground to Barton's Fen along the Middlefork section of the Ozark Trail.

The small section of the Council Bluffs trail we did get to ride was sweet! Single speeds only on this badboy, its ripping contour trail the whole time. unfortunately, the entire lake loop was never completed due to stormage, and the lake loop was also pretty overgrown...tons of ticks and chiggers this weekend :/

So we took the part of the Lake trail to the Ozark connection, then hopped on trace creek going south, until the middlefork split. Went straight for the gold and middleforked it for another 1/2 mile or so, then the climbing began. Ridge, then descent. Then climb, ridge, then descent. Climb, ridge, descent, repeat about 10-12 times, literally. We got to the HWY 49 before Andy Mac started feeling it pretty good, so we took some gravel/pavement back a bit to DD thinking it would be less climbing, wrong. Same climbing, now just no switchbacks. Thankfully from DD back to the Lake there is only 1 climb, then it is basically flat/downhill the whole way along the creek bottoms. We ended up riding about 26-27 miles total, over 5 hours, with two long snack breaks, and lunch thrown in as well. Definitely not the fastest/hardest ride I've ever done, but it was for Andy Mac, he was toast when we got back to camp. I think he passed out around 8:30 and stayed asleep the whole night until 7 am the next day, when the huge storm rolled in. Oh, got a couple pics too but am waiting on an e-mail so I can get them up...good stuff!

Saturday morning had me waking up to rain drops coming through the tent, I scrambled blind and half dressed to get the rain fly back on and thankfully did just was it opened up hard. About 2 inches of rain over 2-3 hours...lame. We decided to say f it cause everything we had was soaked and we knew the overgrowth on the lake loop would not be fun all wet. plus no dry wood = no campfire = no breakfast. Kind of hard to ride without fuel. Came back to Potosi and made some eggs and B&g's...absolutely amazing shit when you've been out for a couple days, went through a couple rains and stink beyond civilized acceptability. Hot showers are really awesome too.

After that we "ruraled" around Potosi. There are actually some pretty sweet ass drops, skinnies, walls, etc to hit in this broken down lead town. plus every other road is gravel, so that's not bad :) Andy Mac headed out and I was again alone here in the OTA house. Boring to say the least when there is only a computer and you have $0 left. Of course it rained another inch last night, really don't feel like weedeating through moist shit all day...

Nature Valley is on live though in about 2 hours...thankfully something halfway fun to watch...too bad it's not mtb racing.

peace and riding!!!