New Trail: good ride, lousy name.

Well, in trying to keep with our"get out and go" Summer, we are WAY behind on posts. Two weekends ago we decided to stay in town and try to put our house back in order as well as riding some local trails. We wanted to do some single bike riding to let Heather remember how to steer and to try out her new, more aggressive tires. We decided to ride a trail I had just found out about a few weeks back. The trail is known by the unfortunate title of "Butterkinfe". This supposedly derives from an incident in which a person out on the trail got lost and was in great peril. he only way he found his direction was by discovering a butterknife that he had dropped on the way in. As I said - lousy name. Anyhow, this trail is about 15 minutes from our house but feels considerably more remote when riding it.




The trail is a multi-access trail, which means motorcycles allowed. The good part is that it means the trail is kept clear by more use than some bike/hike trails. It also means that most of the obstacles were designed to be achievable by motorcycles (less sharp drop-offs and steps, more steep angled rocks).

(Forgive the blurring on the right hand side of the pictures, the lens was dirty.)



In this one you can see the rain clouds gathering - more on that in a moment.

Here's some of the rock obstacles. One thing about riding singles: I take more pictures!


Heather had her hands full on this trail as we haven't ridden something this rocky on singles in a while. There were also several narrow sections with sloping drop-offs beside them (Heather's favorite).

Now, back to the rain...In this one you see Heather trying to outrun the approaching storm.

Sadly, we did not out run the rain and got caught in about 20 min of downpour. One other odd thing about this trail is that you start on about 9 miles of downhill single track, followed by about 4 miles of jeep road climb to get back to the truck. The rain caught us on the way back up, and even worse, right as we got to a section of bentonite clay (nasty, sticky stuff when wet. It pretty much has to be chiseled off the bike once dry).

It clogs the tires, then the tire finally won't roll due to the clay building up so much that it blocks up the chainstays and fork. We had to go quite slow and Heather got hypothermic. Finally we did manage to get home and warm up (and eat!). I'm glad for this one that we weren't out camping as it was much easier to get a hot shower at home. After all of that, Heather did say she wanted to try it again some dry day.