Mt. Fromme

First time riding at Mt. Fromme. I'd been looking forward to riding there for awhile now, but hadn't had the oppourtunity until now. So when some people from Vanuni suggested riding there this weekend, I was all for it.

Well, sort-of. The weather report was predicting rain all week, and I wasn't looking forward to that part. In the end it rained at home, but North Vancouver was merely overcast.

I arrived at the 2nd gate where we planned to meet, at 1:00, right on time. Only to find out that you can't park there. I wasn't sure whether we were going to meet, and go somewhere to park, shuttle up, or what. Nobody else was there though, so I sifted through my email and found a phone number of one of the Vanuni people and called. They told me to park at the bottom of the hill, and ride up to the 2nd gate - and that they were going to be late.

I passed Kris on my way down, and met the others just as I was parking, but one of them needed to do some repairs, so we were a bit late getting started. Unfortunately by the time we got up to the 2nd gate again, Kris gone on without us. We didn't actually start up the mountain until after 2:00.

As we headed up the mountain it began to get foggy. I didn't think that would be a big problem until we got into the forest on our way down. It was too dark to see well, so I turned on my light, but the fog made it impossible to see that way. So I was forced to ride in the near dark.

The plan was to ride Seventh Secret, as it had fewer structures, which we expected would be slippery. However, that was also the furthest trail, and we didn't know if we could get there in time. Turns out we met Kris halfway up, just after he'd finished riding Seventh Secret. He said it was great, but also thought we were too late to make it before dark.

So we decided to ride "Pile of Rocks", which nobody had ridden before. And it wasn't long before we discovered why. It was essentially a small creek that we rode down the middle of, with logs and obstructions in abundance - the few drier parts looked like they hadn't been ridden in awhile.

Then, due to the time we just rode down the main road until the lowest trail, "Bobsled", and rode that to the bottom. This was a great trail. Real flowy with some nice drops, and well ridden.

It was 11km after all was said and done, but because it was mostly the main road, and pretty easy riding, and we took our time, I wasn't all that tired at the end.

My conclusion is that there are probably better trails at Mt. Fromme than we saw today, but that Ledgeview compares well with these trails, and is a lot closer. But it's harder to find anyone to ride without here!