Wipe Fest Ride

Saturday I spent at the "Wipe Fest" ride here in Eugene. The "Coasties" (a group of mtb riders from Florence and nearby areas on the coast) wanted to come over and ride Why Pass with the Disciples of Dirt. The request was to ride every trail in Why Pass, and we did just that! Everyone arrived around 9am, and the weather was looking great, even though the forecast was for thundershowers. It was about 50 degrees when the relatively large group of 28 of us started out. By the end of the day it had warmed up to a lovely 66 degrees. I actually wound up wearing knee warmers, a thin wool long sleeve base layer and thin long sleeve jersey on top of that most of the day, and was perfect. The trails were mostly dry and tacky, and conditions overall were stellar. With the large group we stopped to regroup a fair bit, but the nice thing was there wasn't a huge disparity in skills, so the wait was primarily due to the effect of nearly 30 people in a group. As we saw on short sections, like "Green Velvet Elvis", as the front end of the group was finishing the loop, you could still see the tail end of the group. On one trail, we stopped to have a couple guys do this pretty sweet drop. It wasn't too big (3' at the drop itself, although Isaac and Erik were probably dropping a good 6' by the time they landed below. Isaac was on his dirt jumper and really flyin it, crossing it up, almost went for a bar spin and the whole deal. The crazy part is that shortly after these guys were landing it, they had to slalom through two big trees, and then another one right after. There were some VERY close calls! Bob gets some big cheers too, as he pulled this thing off on his full rigid fixie! Yes, fixie! Nice. We finished off with one of the best descents in the place, and Bob and I rode the final log ride, or specifically, he rode the first part, not sure about the second, and I rode the second part. Super fun. I need to work on that first part, but it's a bit sketch to me so far. At the end of the day, we'd ridden 20.5 miles of singletrack, with almost 3 hours of ride time, and having been out on trails for 4.5 hours with a great group of people. Awesome day. Update: picture thread has started on MTBR.