With all the talk of Kashmir and limited time yesterday, I thought the Kashmir, Kush, BC Trail combo would be a brilliant way to end off this stretch of amazing riding weather.
The beauty of the velcro frozen gravel on service roads is climbability. If I were strava-fied, I'd have crushed it. First time I've been able to clean the full ride from Creekside, up to KadenWoods, and up to Kush without a slip-out or fail. I'll be honest, I stopped for a breather and to check a text at the Home Run/ Microwave Road junction. Other than that, the road was like glue (and a few cautious ice slicks).
The climb from Kush to Kashmir is still brutal and no amount of traction would get me over the last hump. Views are still great, but where the fk is the snow? I'm guessing there is snow at this elevation as of this morning?
Kashmir and Kush were brilliant. And yes, I was reminded how uppie/downie Kashmir is. No EWS there. But man that trail is fun. With the frozen hero duff, it was sort of almost flowy. Kush certainly gets more traffic, but it still ran really well and fast in these conditions. Just didn't want to go down, so I didn't.
After Kush I was going to head over toward the Microwave tower to try out some other stuff, but time was short, so I headed to middle and lower BC Trail. Holy trailwork on middle. That was a glorious fast romp and the drainage and erosion nightmares of a bike park season seem to have been tidied up. The new bridges were "robust" to say the least. Lower BC had no new work, but given that it's largely flowy little rock slabs and mini-drops, it's pretty robust down there. I was bad-mouthing BC's a while back, but I ate my words yesterday.
I'm sure this is all covered with snow today:
Glad I was able to get it while the getting was so good.
