I’m a little late on the draw here, but I wanted to throw down some pics and commentary from this last weekend. I decided to skip town, yet again, and head to the land of turquoise jewelery and epic mountain bike rides: Santa Fe.

It was partially because I needed a bit of a chillaxing weekend, and I never quite get that in town with a million and one things to do around the house. It was also partially (mostly) because it’s been way too long since I’ve seen these two cats.

I brought the singlespeed along (of course), but didn’t end up touching it the whole weekend. Mike had some other plans for me, and presented me with a blinged-out carbon Meta 5.5.

What is this? 5.5 inches of suspension, 27 gears, and 24 lbs??? I didn’t even know where to start with this fine piece of work.

I figured it out pretty quick. We ended up doing a pretty awesome 5 hour shred which took us through snow, dust, creeks, and delicious singletrack.

The uphills took some getting used to, and quite frankly, my knees hurt a bit from sitting and spinning on a bike that was probably not fit quite right. I was definitely yearning for the singlespeed on the climb, even to the point that Lauren kept repeating “You can sit down, you’re not on a singlespeed”.

Then we hit the downhills, and the joys of suspension came out in full force. I consider myself a pretty good technical descender, and pretty quick considering my normal ride is a hardtail (sometimes fully rigid). But damn, that bike made me so much faster. I would be hauling down a technical descent, dropping off everything I could find, and jumping the thing into the middle of rock gardens and not even slowing down.

At one point we stopped and Mike just started laughing and said something to the effect of “That was one of the smoothest, funnest lines following you through there, and you would have NEVER have taken that line on your hardtail.”

Yeah, it was nice.

Sunday brought another lazy morning after a late night of beers and Xbox (yes, we played xbox until the wee hours of the night, it was awesome).

Sunday also brought dirt jumping.

Now, as you know, I am not an avid dirt jumper. In fact, I have gone exactly 1 time with Shawn, and that is that. In light of this fact, Mike decided we needed every possible advantage, and we skipped right over the hardtails and went straight for the throat.

7 inches of travel? Downhill geometry? That should effectively swallow up any major mistakes that I could make, right?

And swallow it did. We shredded hard for a couple hours, starting off on the slalom course at La Tierra, moving out to some other smaller ‘practice’ runs and then back to the slalom course to hone our skills.

Mike was ripping it up from the start, but by the end of it, I was doing my fair share of nailing jumps, pinning it into the burms, and generally having a grand time.

I guess some of these bike handling skills really do translate…..

All in all, it was a great weekend. I’m glad I went to santa fe, I’m glad I jumped on some bikes that were out of my normal repertoire, and I’m glad to have some rad friends who are willing to throw down at a moment’s notice.

Good times.