Man, it’s been a roller coaster the last few days.

As some of you saw on my twitter account I took a little excursion up to snowbowl on thursday night. J-money gave me a call at work on thursday trying to convince me to go to wolf creek this weekend. My skis weren’t waxed, my motivation was low for driving 7 hours, and my company christmas party for work was on friday (where I won one of the most fabulous raffle prizes in existence).

However, the call piqued my curiosity as to our snow conditions, so I grabbed my running shoes, some warm clothes, and my snowshoes and headed up to snowbowl to see what I could see.

I ended up hiking up the humphrey’s trail to the saddle and took a look into the inner basin. Lets just say, I’m not entirely sure what tRoy, J-money, and the Redheaded Stepchild skied on last weekend. I saw a field of rocks and rubble with a smattering of snow on it. Even the trail through the woods was only about 50-50 snow and dry ground. It’s gonna take a lot of snow before we’re skiing safely up there.

On a side note Gore-Tex socks and scree gaiters are quite possibly one of the greatest combinations ever. My feet were totally dry inside my running shoes even when I was tromping threw the snow at the top of the trail. Freakin’ sweet.

I hightailed it out of work on friday a bit early for a ride with Adam. It still never ceases to amaze me how different biking muscles and hiking muscles are. I could barely keep the pedals moving on friday due to the thursday night excursion. Damn.

Then saturday came.

That fateful saturday.

You started off so well, and ended in such disaster.

The morning began with homemade biscuts and gravy. So delicious. Adam came by and finished off whatever was left after I had at it, and we hatched a plan for mountain biking in sedona before the storm blew in. We loaded the bikes, grabbed the gear, and headed out of town.

Just as I was getting up to speed on the highway, BOOM! Something that sounded like a shotgun (or maybe a small truck-bomb) went off on the roof of my car.

My heart sunk. I knew what it was as I looked in the rearview mirror at the spider-webbed back window of the subaru and pulled off the side of the road.

Apparently when I latched down the back wheel of my bike, I didn’t push the strap in far enough, and it didn’t catch the ratchet mechanism. When the wind caught the bike (it was facing backwards) it flipped up and over the top of the rack, the handlebars hit the back window of the car, and the bottom of the fork dropouts snapped off. This sent the bike into the road behind me, and from the scratches I found, it appears to have landed seat-first. Luckily nobody hit it, and nobody was hurt, but it looks like I’m going to be on the phone with magura on monday talking about some new fork lowers.

Does anyone have a rigid fork I can borrow for a couple weeks? If it had a chris king crown race on it already, it would be even easier.

C’est la vie.

Fortunately, there was some snow that fell here last night, and it looks like there is more on the way.

Unfortunately, I really like riding my bike, and it is 100% out of commision at this point.