Kootenay Triple Crown
A Nelson Lakeside Epic
Words by Alex Woikon with Riley McIntosh.
Date: 2009-02-04
I forget where I heard September referred to as "Epictember," but here in Nelson no word better defines that month. The days are warm, but after 4 pm it gets cold. The dirt becomes frosted above 3,000 feet, and corners are again tacky shred-railers instead of dusty bullshit. The larches begin to change colour, and the never ending green expanse of our mountains become tacked with clusters of yellow.
Three Septembers ago two great friends, Evan Schwartz and Riley McIntosh and I headed out into our local trail system on an ill-planned, sporadic adventure of moderately massive proportions.
It is a favourite subject of ours, a day we have recalled many times while sitting on our bikes at the top of a trail, hanging out at the Sacred Ride Bike Shop, or shuttling one of our local descents.
Riley came into the shop yesterday to get some new Five Tens and we started talking about that ride again. We call it our North Shore Triple Crown.
For the past few years the three of us have gabbed extensively about trying to recreate this ride. Our intentions have been sincere, we have always wanted to do it again, but there is a lingering fear that in trying to recreate this ride there is absolutely no way that it would be possible. The calibre of that day was huge.
As we reminisced Riley asked if I still had the pictures somewhere. I clicked around on the shop computer and sure enough, they were all still there.
Fall riding is as good as it gets, Alex passes the camera off and grips some granite. Photo ~ Riley McIntosh
Nelson has a traditional October mountain bike event called the 'NRG Triple Crown,' where the boys from NRG Enterprises, a bike parts distribution company based above the Nelson Brewery, organize a 1 day death march. It comprises the Highballer/Placenta, Vein, and Paper Bag rides, three of the biggest rides close to town. I'm sure the winning time is something stupid like 4 hours, the more common finish line crossing being around 8 hours.
For some dubious reason we decided to do our own version of that event but on the 'North Shore' of Nelson, which is the strip of highway leading from the Orange Bridge north towards Balfour. There are tons of great trails over there, the most well known being the 'Kokanee Creek' trails, such as Hitman, Newt Sack, and Shitaker. Our plan was to beat our way un-motorized up to the summits of three big fellas in one day: Slabalanche, Upper Sitkum, and Upper Hitman.
9,500 of climbing and descending on 8" bikes with short seat posts. Why would we do this? It would make a lot more sense to do rides like this on pedal-able bikes. But we didn't care. The weather was so beautiful that I guess we just felt like slogging around in the mountains for 10 hours. Plus, we'd shred the downhills way harder on our big bikes. That and none of us had a second bike.
I remember throwing the idea past just about everyone who I talked to. Most people thought I was nuts and wished me luck. Luckily Evan and Riley were more than stoked to shred three big trails in one day. We decided on a Sunday, meeting at my house at around 9 am.
The morning of the ride I woke up early. There is nothing that gets my blood flowing than the prospect of a good riding day. I filled my bladder, stocked up my pack, made some snacks, drank a coffee. Ready to ride. My lunch was a just a bunch of sliced cheddar cheese and crackers. I remembered to bring my camera, rain jacket and a spare jersey. After rolling my bike out and lifting it into my truck, I sat down and began to daydream about the upcoming day.
I'll admit to the doubts I had once 9:30 had passed. Where the hell were Riley and Evan? I didn't want to do this ride by myself. As soon as I thought this I saw Riley's dirt brown 4 Runner crest the hill near my house. It was on.
Following our morning greetings, we set out to ride Slabalanche first. This is one of my favorite trails. It is a good mix of steep granite faces with fast-flowing dirt corners with a fair number of skinnies that cover roughly 2500 vertical feet. The best part of this trail is that the access is gated. No shuttling here leaves it fresh and often unused. To ride the trail you have to pedal or push up to the trail head. The entire day we did not pedal one stroke uphill, we pushed our bikes up like lazy gebronis.
Epictember weather: calling for sunny and perfect but changing at any moment. Photo ~ Mattias Fredriksson
Ideally this type of ride would be great on an all mountain bike. Something with at least a granny gear would have come in handy. As it was we were trying to be all antiestablishment with our chain guides and dirt jump seats. My Brodie was a couple pounds over fifty and I'm sure Evan and Riley's Konas were pushing at least forty-five pounds. Once all our shit was in order we started the hike up to Slabalanche.
Part way up, after the first switchback, Evan found a dead mouse on the side of the road. He picked it up, placed it on the wide brim of his straw hat and brought it with us on our mission like a tiny mascot for our ride. Only six more switch-backs to go. The lack of traffic on this road makes for the perfect home for all kinds of wildlife. On this particular day we saw only a few massive elk, but I have also seen wolves and numerous black bears while on my way up to this trail. The fear is good motivation to keep moving up this stiff climb.
In the Kootenays the weather here changes often in the course of a day or even in a couple of hours. Once we reached the seventh switchback, where spur road 400 leads to the trailhead, the sun broke through the cloud cover, upping our stoke factor to a new level. What could be better than granite slabs and sunshine and good friends?
Anyone who has ridden Slabalanche knows exactly how appropriate the name is. This trail has nearly thirty rock faces, most of which are so steep that the run out is not visible until you have committed to dropping over the crest.
Evan gets his slab on. Remember - the camera adds 10 degrees of steepness remember. Photo ~ Alex Woikon
If you pin it down, you can ride all of Slabalance in about 15 minutes. This day we took more of a relaxed pace. We stopped and shot a few photos on a couple of the slabs, thanks to the few beams of sunshine which decided to grace our first descent.
Slabalanche has some quality sections and features. The sketchy old roll-down bridge to teeter at the entrance. Lots of soft loamy steeps near the top. Bridges! So many natural log bridges. There is that gnar-gnar jagger bowling-alley granite trench ride that will leave you wondering, how the hell did I just ride that? More bridges leading onto wide open steep-ass rock faces. Oh and the monster rock face into high speed left hand berm. The trail spits you out on the power line on the first switch-back of the access road and you rip back down the road back to the vehicles. This part of road is super steep, letting go of the brakes allows you to get up to at least 75 km an hour; what a wicked way to finish a trail.
Back at our vehicles we opened up the tail gates and had a little sit down. We were coming up on 12 noon, and our sunlight had ducked behind a nasty looking rain cloud. The stoke factor was still way up so we loaded up and drove over to the bottom of Sitkum.
The Upper Sitkum trail starts way up there, at the 6.5 kilometre mark. Lower Sitkum is an extremely jumpy, flowy trail that is ridden often. Upper Sitkum, not so much. It is really steep and straight down, kind of 'old school' in the sense that people want speed and flow these days instead of grab-yer-ass vertical fallout.
The climb began in veiled sunshine and grayed out into spittle drizzle. We soldiered on, happy to be outside with a goal. We were still buzzing from Slabalanche's booty and not really minding the steep grade.
Jeez is that the sun coming out again. Sure is. What? Really? No more oysters? And the beer is gone too? What is a mountain biker to do. Persevere, that's what. Photo ~ Alex Woikon
At the 4 kilometre mark we began to get tired. In traditional tired treading uphill group talk, the conversation began to get quirky. I love that about friends. There's town friends, people you see at parties, or at the gas station. The real friends are the people who you share big outdoor adventures with. These are the people who witness your unguarded side. They see you tired, angry, hurt. They see you starving, unable to find your keys, muttering gibberish.
As we plodded up Sitkum we made constant references to the dead mouse on Evan's cowboy hat (still) and his luck for getting to travel to new places. We commented on the irony that his travels were posthumous.
The rain hardened, and drilled into the back of necks. We were still in good enough moods that this made us feel tough as in, "nobody else in town is out here riding, we are such cool dudes."
The ride down Upper Sitkum wiped that smirk off our faces, it was super slippery and treacherous. The flow was not there. What was there was a trail that was out to get us. We slid like we were on crazy carpets.
Dropping into Lower Sitkum things changed. Here was a trail we were familiar with. Berm bashing at its finest. So far we had about 5,500 vertical feet of climbing on our legs but we weren't riding like it. We pedaled into the corners, charged the short uphills. We didn't stop for pictures - just razzed the trail like we were late for lunch.
It was raining full tilt once we got back to the trucks. We got soaked, were still happy, but feeling a bit like sitting ducks for whatever mother nature wanted to throw at us. What happened to Epictember?
With the trailhead of Upper Hitman about 4,000 vertical feet above us we all agreed that hell awaited if we attempted it. Plus, it was getting towards 3:30 and dark would be coming by 6:00.
We sat on the tailgates of the Mazda b2000 and the roached Toyota 4Runnner. We ate little bits of cheese and crumbs of crackers. We sucked back smoked oysters, adding the tins to the debris of a roadside redneck fire pile. We wished we had more food, Evan desperately craved orange juice, I wanted cinnamon buns, Riley drooled for Heavenly Hash ice cream. All the while we anticipated the pain of the coming climb.
Then the skies cleared, the rain stopped, and we felt good. We started talking about girls (which always clears a spirit) and changed into the few dry articles we had.
And...we pussed out. Yes, we loaded up the red Mazda and drove up to six kilometer on Sitkum Road like slinking cheaters. Well, not really slinking cheaters because we still had a good 2,000 feet or so of climbing to do.
Slabbalanche, Upper Sitkum, and Upper Hitman are all in this photo. Where's waldo? Photo ~ Riley McIntosh
An amazing thing occurred when we discovered four cans of Nelson Brewery 'Faceplant' beer under a pile of gear. A blessing from the mountain gods. Riley drank two and Evan and I had one each. Riley got pretty hammered off those two Faceplants and got really stoked and was yelling at us about how we had to bang off Upper Hitman and once we got back we'd feel like heroes.
His bonked-tired-drunk buzz got us feeling excited again, crawling steadily uphill in the old Mazda, spinning the rear tires in each sopping wet water bar. Once we started up the hill, pushing our bikes once again, we all realized that we were tired. Riley came off his buzz and was the most washed out. He was having a hard time putting one foot in front of the other. I kept alternating between dreaming about cinnamon buns and feeling angry for not bringing much food. How dumb can you get?
We did a lot of talking but more yelling, you know how when you start to bonk you get delirious? Evan still had the mouse and we commented that although we felt tired, that mouse looked even more washed up. I would love to hear a recording of the garbage that was coming out of our mouths. That might have been the winning session of the shit talk championships.
Evan was pretty strong on the way up though and kept an all right pace. Once we reached the top we scrounged in our bags for something to eat but there wasn't a thing. It was now somewhere close to 5 pm and dark came a lot sooner than it had a couple weeks back when summer was still in full swing. We had about 3,500 feet of descent below us. Upper Hitman was fairly fresh back then and the first kilometer of the trail is a low angle, flowy as all get out trail through sub alpine fir forest.
To be honest I don't remember the first half of that descent very well; I think my brain was having a hard time staying in gear. The motor neurons were casing hard at this point.
Have you ever done a big bike epic? Would you like to? Is it true that the Kootenays has some of the best riding in the world? Chime in...
Check out Part II By Riley McIntosh.
Stumble this!
Tweet this!
