Hokkaidoborough, New Hampshire

South of Concord and West of Nashua stands a magical mountain that reveals itself only on the deepest of powder days.  It is the mystical land known as Hokkaidoborough, New Hampshire.

Thanksgiving: Turkey, Football and Lincoln Gap

In what has quickly become a Thanksgiving tradition.  I made a trip up to Lincoln Gap to sample the powdery goods that the closed Lincoln Gap road has to offer.

A Rare Day in Colorado's Front Range

High above Colorado Springs.

There are some pretty weird hobbies in this world:  rubber band collections, dressing up like a stuffed animal, or jumping off bridges with a parachute to name a few.

When you really think about it, climbing and descending hiking trails on a bicycle is no more or less reasonable than collecting porcelain figurines, running ultra-marathons or re-writing all the endings to Disney movies to make them horror flicks.

But for some reason I've chosen mountain biking.  So, what exactly do I get out of it?  Why do I spend an inordinate amount of my free time either mountain biking or thinking about mountain biking?  Why is it more appealing to me than, say, chasing a little white ball around a meticulously landscaped yard?

Answering the Riddle at Charlemont Trails (June 2014)

Something tells me the skiing in this glade isn't too shabby either.

A couple of years ago I was enjoying an evening ride on the singletrack around Belmont Rock Meadow when I came across another mountain biker.  We stopped to chat for moment and he presented me with a riddle that I've been struggling with ever since.

"Where can I find the real big hills around here? The long climbs and descents?", he posited.

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.

Blueberry Lake Trails: First World Problems

I'm getting really fed up with the beautiful scenery too.

This is getting ridiculous.  It's getting harder and harder these days to go anywhere in Vermont where you can pull your bike off the back of your car and not land on some fantastic singletrack.

Richmond, VA: Buttermilk and The Unpainted Two-By-Four

Remember to yield to this dude if you see him on the trails.

I rounded what I guessed would be the last in a series of switchbacks on my way down a steep embankment to the James River near Richmond, Virginia.  I was already well behind my seat to compensate for the steep downward angle and travelling beyond a comfortable speed.  Ahead of me appeared a wooden ramp structure with one more ninety degree turn.  A single two-by-four was all that stood between my inertia filled body and a ten foot dive onto rocks and pavement below.  As my tires skidded onto the dirt covered wood it was all I could do to keep them from locking.  As I looked ahead at the fast approaching two-by-four, I couldn't help but notice that it was conspicuously fresh looking and unpainted.

I clearly wasn't the first person to test that ramp.

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."

Trip Report: The Mohawk Trail Slides

In the early morning hours of August 28, 2011, thousands of cubic yards of earth cut loose from its anchors on the slopes above the Cold River in Savoy, Massachusetts.  The saturated ground, which had already seen four inches of rain in the previous two weeks, gave way as tropical storm Irene dumped another six inches in less than eighteen hours.  The resulting avalanche of dirt, trees and rocks cut three distinct slides down the mountainside, across the road, and into the raging flood waters below.

Santos Trails And the Endless Descent Dream

Turn, pedal, descend, turn, repeat.

Every once in a while you wake up with no clue where you are, what time it is, or how the heck you got there.  Ever since my diaper wearing drill sergeant arrived in August, those moments have been occurring with more frequency than I’d like to admit.  In that split-second, when you’re perched on the precipice between the dream world and reality, both sides seem equally plausible; and equally absurd.  In those moments your brain scrambles to dissect what was the dream and what reality is awaiting you. 

Was the baby crying?  Was I skiing?  Am I in a tent on top of Lafayette?  Am I sleeping in a chair again?

As I sit here writing about my most recent adventure, I feel like I’m sitting on that divide trying to get a grip on reality.  What the heck just happened?

Trip Report: Lincoln Gap 12.28.12

If you're anything like me you'll spend most of your workday this Friday pawing through satellite images, psychoanalyzing canopy density, speculating on tree species and forest age, tracing shadow length and slope grade, and generally looking for the perfect backcountry tour. But before you do, burn this image into your mind. This is what the world's most perfectly spaced hardwood glade looks like. From the ground up.

If, by some stroke of luck, you can actually learn to read the signs and find yourself guessing right and standing some place that looks a little like this, there's a very good chance you will be somewhere in central Vermont, just south of Lincoln Gap Road.

Trip Report: Christmas on Cardigan 12.25.12

It's been so long since we last toured Cardigan Mountain (see: A Backcountry Mountain with Training Wheels (2008)) that I almost forgot how much I like everything about this tiny little southern NH peak.  It's close to home, quick to hike, short enough to forgive poor planning, and covered in nice, shallow, mostly avy-free snowfields. There are multiple ways down that are easy to scout on the climb, and and if there's no powder to schuss there's still bound to be enough ice to give Yukon Cornelius a 12 inch pick. Most importantly, Cardigan is a place longtime gear-queer turned first-time BC skiers and alpinists can go to cut their teeth, and bring their family along for the ride.

Since that trip long ago in 2008, climbing Cardigan from the east via the AMC lodge and CCC trail, I've been thinking about a return to explore the western approach. Maybe I've been overlooking it for more exotic tours, or maybe it's just my place of last resort from a bad snow year. Regardless, the things I've seen and done and skied on on the western approach were enough to make me regret these past five years of neglect.

Uphill Report from Pico: 38 Degree POW

I may be a GED legal-beagle when it comes to public land use lawyering, but I make up for it by being a semi-professional weatherman when it comes to picking amazing ski tours to do on apocalyptic end-of-Mayan-calendar days like today.

In a world of climatic uncertainty, at least one thing was guaranteed. There was no way I was going to let the end of days pass me by without skiing one last time, low pressure front and 38 degree air be damned.

Kmart Special: Ski the Skiddies for Free

A rare shot of Killington without hundreds of
human cannonballs overhead

Two days ago the New York Times reported that the ski industry was dead. And the Times is almost never wrong. Everyone but me remembers what they did to disco. And maybe Donna Summers too. But skiing? Not on my watch you leftist tree-humping pessimists. Not when mankind can harness the power of dead dinosaurs to pump millions of gallons of reclaimed sewage water into sub 32 degree air, to freeze before it falls like concrete onto the logging and fire road wastelands of America's ski areas.

And this magical phenomenon is even more appropriate when you consider how much manmade snow in a bad snow year makes a mountain look like a pile of s#it with streaks of white skiddies all over it. A white ribbon of death from your a@%.

Luckily I'm within driving distance of the cradle of s#itty man-made skiing, and this morning I rose extra early to find out for myself if the rumors were true. It's been years since I've violated that sacred oath that every Vermont grade schooler takes daily before the pledge of allegiance. To never, ever, not even for a million dollars ski at Killington. Would the ski gods ever forgive me?

Map of Northeast Mountain Biking Trail Reports

I will now start sorting through the angry emails from mountain bikers in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Now that I finally brought order to our backcountry skiing chaos, I was inspired to clean up the mess that was our mountain biking trip reports.

Mangy, Mangy Moose

The crowning moose.

Little known fact. Moosilauke is an ancient Abenaki word for babyheads. Moose-hillock literally means "crowning fetal moose." A horrible image to describe an even more horrible early ski season phenomenon that I've never before encountered. Until this morning, my first ski tour of the season.

I'd been talked into a solo dawn patrol of Moosilauke late last night by Andy, who made a number of excellent points about the importance of getting a 2012 NEBC tour of The Moose on the books as soon as conditions allowed.

That conversation went something like this:

Biking Bondcliff

My White Whale

Waterlogged and exhausted from close to 25 miles and 8,000 feet of hiking in the rain with a 30 pound pack it was all I could do to put one blistered foot in front of the other.  Lower back spasms brought me to my knees more than once, but each time I managed to climb back upright on my cramped legs and push on in the rain.

It was the second day of Gered’s bachelor party weekend.  Our motley crew of hikers had set out the previous day from the Lincoln Woods visitors’ center intent on completing the famed loop around the Pemigewasset Wilderness. We were supposed to climb up onto the Franconia ridge, march past Garfield and eventually descend down off of Bondcliff. 

We had failed miserably.  And now the Wilderness Trail was having its way with us.

Lexington Singletracks (July 2012)

Not exactly a straight line.

The Minuteman Bikeway in MetroWest Boston is one of the most famous rail trails in the country.  And with good reason.  It provides a scenic and historic byway from Cambridge all the way to Bedford. Along the way it visits the town centers of Arlington and Lexington with their excellent restaurants and cultural attractions.  It is gem.  But it is also an attention whore.

An April Doubleheader In the Kingdom

Sometimes April brings a rare opportunity to enjoy my two favorite sports: skiing and mountain biking.  You would expect that a day where you could mix the two would lead to mediocre conditions for both.  Typically the best you could hope for would be some turns on corn snow followed by a slog on some muddy singletrack.  But last weekend provided an unbelievable opportunity to enjoy both sports at their best.

Return to North Twin Slide (March 2012)

I think it’s safe to say that running into a machete wielding stranger deep in the wilderness is probably high on most people's list of nightmare scenarios.  Sometimes, however, it can be the answer to your prayers.