The Other Side of Ellicottville (May 2014)

This is what flow looks like.

In what is fast becoming an annual tradition, I made a late May trip to ride the trails around Ellicottville, New York.  Almost exactly a year ago I made my first trip there and was awestruck with mostly smooth, swoopy singletrack I found.  I had sampled Big Merlin, Rain, Sidewinder, Mesa, among some of the other trails on one side of the mountain.

However, an offhand comment from a rider I met near the end of my day there, stuck with me.  When I told him where I had ridden, he exclaimed, "Oh, man, you haven't even seen the half of it!"   While the map showed a number of trails in the Northwest corner, I couldn't imagine they would differ so greatly from what I had already ridden.

Did they ever.

Ellicottville: A Little Magic In Western New York

Make sure to get wide right of that tree.

It was 1999 and the beginning of the playoffs for Lord Stanley's Cup.  I was a marginal Bruins fan, and they were facing my girlfriend's Buffalo Sabres in the early rounds.  We were headed to meet her family for the first time, and I commented on how I could tease her father about the series if Boston played well.

With the most serious of looks on her face, my future wife looked at me and said, "That wouldn't be funny.  Don't do that.  Really.  Don't."