Woke up to Delheimer getting ready for a day of skiing. Got moving since today was the day that we had chose to bail from Truckee. Luckily my transceiver turned up in Delheimer's toy bin in the basement, and we lugged all our stuff up his steep set of steps (his house is on a steep hillside). Lily has a little system for the packing that makes it pretty easy. We headed over to Nate Dawg's house to retrieve our bikes and got a pretty legit lock and cable at the hardware store. We changed our oil (the Sienna takes 5 quarts I found out), and had the unfortunate task of taking back the wrong oil filter once I had already changed the oil out. We got on the road and made our way to Lake Tahoe. We stopped at T's Burritos on the way through Incline Village and munched on some of the best burritos anywhere. We stopped along the drive around the Lake for some photo op's (crazy blue/green water and huge snow capped mountains in contrast w/ one another). We got onto 395 and took it along Bridgeport and into the Eastern Sierras. One amazing view after another for hours. A funny thing happened along the way. I called Brian Bowman on a whim and found out that we were nearby a kick ass downhill mountain bike trail- off Lower Rock Creek Rd. We stopped and I jumped on the Enduro and sped off down the trail. The first couple sections were fun and flowy and followed a creek bed w/ HUGE snow capped peaks off to the right and a rocky canyon w/ crazy fingers of rock on the other side. I was pretty much content to call it good at that point, but Lily spurred me on to ride the next section. The road peeled away immediately and climbed way up w/ no idea of where it goes in relation to the trail. "Oh well" I said as I ripped off down the trail. It wove through boulders near the creek and had lots of flowy sections w/ some sandy corners sprinkled in to keep you honest. I honestly started to panic when the trail turned upwards into the talus field above. I pictured myself hiking my bike out after dark because I foolishly thought I could milk some more vertical pleasure. But it quickly turned downhill again and I rode on with purposeful quickness. It got a little more tech-gnar at the bottom and had some slow rocky tech sections. I almost ate it a couple of times trying to clear stuff w/ my xc bike and clipless pedals. When I ran into a jogger going the same way I was pretty stoked to know I wasn't going to be spending the night spooning my bike!! I finally popped out onto LRC Rd. in the middle of a hairpin corner. I only had to wait 5ish minutes until Lily rounded the corner. She had been waiting down below but decided to make a couple of sweeps. We quickly returned her to the top and she rode the first two sections. She was pretty stoked on the trails (not SUPER gnarly and no BONKER climb). We rallied back into Bishop and did some shopping at Von's (the only grocery store in town was of course in a strip mall w/ K-mart). We then headed out to the Kenoi Hotsprings which Daron recommended. Sure enought- there was a stream that came down the mountain and filled numerous pools. We had to poke around a bit to find one w/o people in it (It was Fri night). We soaked in a couple of different pools- the first one was NOT hot- and finally found a nice temped pool. In a daze we stumbled back to the van and crashed nearby the only vegetation in the whole place- a tree that shaded us a bit from the wind/sun. A weird thing happened that night. My hip just absolutely KILLED ME every time I moved and especially if I rolled onto it. Hmmmmmm....maybe those couple of days of feverish skinning caught up with me?!! I'm definitely getting older!! Snore!!
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