More Snow!

Yesterday I had the morning off so I headed up to Sundance. I got a few good runs in on bad snow but I learned a lot. I'm trying hard to concentrate on the basics. Today Ash and I hit up Snowbird. One thing I got over this week was crashing. I decided I'd just need to crash sometimes. So I crashed a lot. But now I'm trying to make good turns and riding well and not getting intimidated. Ash hit a few cool jumps which are inspiring. I'm excited that I'm getting more and more comfortable, and even more excited that I've already been to three resorts!

Snowboarding!!!

Yesterday Ash and I headed up for our first snowboarding day of the year. It was my first time ever in this half of my life. I've been once but I think I was 12. We had a blast and the snow was so good! I had a good time picking myself up out of the snow every 50 or so meters. We hit the bunny hill 3 times and then got some lunch. We paid aobut $45 per gram of food, of course, since we didn't pack lunches, enjoying our "costs its weight in gold" food at Brighton

but it was actually halfway decent (it didn't come back up a half an hour later). Then we hit a blue run and I forgot everything I learned that morning (actually I just had to pee really bad!) I got back on (beginners) form after I took a pee stop halfway down. One more run and we called it a day, headed to the best burger joint in Utah, JCW's in A.F. Great burgers are a great end to a great day of boarding!

Slopestyle

Slopestyle mountain biking is cool. Be sure to watch the crash at 0:45

Getting more hardcore.

My Trance is becoming a little more hardcore this week. I sold my double (22/32/bash) crankset a couple weeks ago when I thought I was going to sell the Trance in order to cut costs on repairing the fork (which I am now completely rebuilding). So I decided to take the opportunity to put a single with a chainguide on th it. I bought a RaceFace Evolve DH crank, E 13 chainguide and also decided to get rid of the Saint derailleur and put on SRAM X9. Getting everything all set up was very frustrating but hopefully will be worth it in the end.
Here is the BB with the ISCG adapter going on. Got to love that Gold, baby! I ended up having to put the adapter (which acts like a BB spacer on 68mm BB shells) on the inside of the other spacer in order to get the chainline. This made for some clearance issues with the linkage and I had to file down the backside of the adapter. All of this by trial and error of course...RaceFace's downhill cranksets have extra 1mm spacer that go on the spindle, which you can move from one side to another in order to line up the chainring and the chainguide. This was frustrating, because the spindle fit into the BB cups like... well, it didn't fit. It needed some love taps to get in. And out. And in again. And out and in over and over. Anyway, the white guide and bashguard look sweet with the white frame, much better than the "black hole" look I had going before.

Ahh!!! SRAM... I love it. After riding my bro-in-laws SX with SRAM X0 I was sold. I got the X9 stuff and it shifts better than my Saint stuff ever did... thank goodness, since the Saint stuff shifted like crap! You'll notice that there is still part of the old Saint RD holding the wheel on. The Saint derailleur mounted to the axle and held the wheel tight. The threaded nuts needed to replace this upper part are impossible to find, so this fat piece will have to do... until my DT RMS quick release comes in.
Here's the back end view. The derailleur was easy to brake apart but the upper piece still needed some "machining" (hacksaw and file) to clear the SRAM derailleur. Yes, that's an 11-21t cassette. Only for die-hard roadies. I think I'll end up with an 11-26 on here.

As you can see in the top photo, there is a rag sticking out of the top right of the fork. That is where the damper goes, which is still awaiting it's rebuild. Looks simple enough, but the guys at Fox told me it was almost impossible to do well. Well, after that chainguide mess, I'm feeling pretty invinsible, so we'll see how it goes. To bad I'm gonna have to wait for winter to end to test ride this all....