O’er the Hills and Through the Mud

Talk about another great weather weekend.  So far, two in a row.  I hope this trend continues.  Anyways, this weekend was another first of the summer months: Mountain Biking.  I brought up my bike to Chicago this weekend and on Saturday we went to the Forest Preserve District, and visited the Palos trails.  The main trails used for running, horseback riding, biking, etc, were nice and easy.  However, as soon as you got off the main paths, it quickly went to mud (at least the one we jumped on).  We were actually out there for quite some time, especially since it was the first time this year.

We started on the blue trail near Bullfrog lake, then met up with the green, then orange, then yellow.  We took the yellow trail to the brown, and not having any idea where we were (nor how far we were from anything, headed back.  All of these trails were wide trails, no single track, so the it wasn’t that much excitement.  However, on the way back, we jumped on the dark green trail by Joe’s Pond.  This was a single track, and about 50 feet into it, it got pretty muddy.  On the map, they don’t show it going past the road, but in fact it does, and with the meandering stream down there, it went from muddy, to, “holy crap, are there ANY dry spots?” and “That creek is kind of intimidating with the rocks and stuff.”  Needless to say when we came out at Pioneer Woods, we were covered.

It was an awesome time though.  Too bad my ass took the blunt of it, and it’s incredibly sore now.  But, my bike didn’t attack me like Erin’s did.  She has metal pedals, and both of the back sides of her ankles are hacked up pretty well.  Thankfully, I came out relatively unscathed.

I hope next weekend is just as nice, because I could definitely handle doing that again.  In fact, I left my bike up with her, so it’s all set.  Granted, it’s more to do with the fact we thought we were going to go riding again on Sunday, and never actually got around to cleaning them off.