Mt. Hood East Side Epic

Holy cow! What happened to fall. I thought I'd spend a couple of minutes doing some blog-stalking tonight and realized while all my blog friends have been diligently posting significant events, I've been a lazy blogger. I'll blame it on the fact that I'm having too much fun to blog this fall.

Fall event #1- The Mt. Hood East Side Epic. Jarred had this great idea last year that he wanted to organize a mountain bike ride that covered over 50 miles of trails up in the Mt. Hood area. Actually, his original ideas was 75 miles but very few people want to punish themselves to this extent and linking up 75 miles of single track is hard. So after a winter of bickering with the forest service (only because of general disorganization- like any government run entity), getting sponsorships and working out a good route the ride was a reality. Now if only people would sign up..... since Jarred and our friend Ted, who jumped on board to help Jarred out with sponsorships, could not charge for the ride (forest service rules), not many people initially committed to riding. I think there were 10 riders signed up two weeks before the event. However, because of a stellar forecast, another 40 people signed up the week of the ride. Between the 50 riders and 10 guides, this shaped up to be quite an event. By the time 8 am rolled around the parking lot where we met was full and 50 bikers waited eagerly to get started. The only hang up initially was the fact that because of lack of communication between the forest service and the forest "cops" the forest cops only caught wind of the ride the morning of the ride and they were not happy about the situation. After initially blaming Jarred for his lack of communication and threatening arrest (not sure how this was going to take place as these guys were glorified security guards) the situation was resolved and we were on our way. I volunteered to run sweep- ie ride at the back and pick up the slow, injured or people with mechanical problems. I am generally the sweep because I am the slowest in the group of riders we ride with, however I wasn't expecting this kind of slow, so running sweep was a little different on this ride. It was nice to see all sorts of riders on all sorts of bikes.
Overall the ride was a success, everyone finished the entire 50 miles and we only had one minor crash and one minor detour off trail. The only bummer about the day was that those of us who ran shuttle to the starting point of the ride all had our vehicles broken. Both Jarred and I lost our wallets, clothes and some camping gear. While our insurance company treated us right, it was a pain and a disappointment to come back to a vandalized car.