I had the chance to visit the Salsa Cycles HQ in Minneapolis for the unveiling and riding of Salsa’s two new full suspension bikes. The bikes were designed to have a similar ride with wheel size being the main difference. The 26er called the El Kaboing has 5 inches of rear wheel travel and the 29er called the Big Mamma has 4 inches.

Salsa said they designed the bikes with three things in mind: performance, reliability, durability. The most notable features, which enveloped these three things, to me, were: the post mount rear brake tabs, three sealed main pivot bearings (two drive side one non-drive), one piece linkage, no rear end pivot, and maximized weld areas. I found it admirable that salsa was able to admit a weakness in their own products specking a Race Face seatpost and stem (they said they were working on getting their own products up to par for performance).

Here are some pictures of the more notable features on the bikes:

For more specs and pictures of the bikes visit Salsa’s website.

I had a chance to ride each of the bikes over a few days in Northwest Wisconsin (See issue 115 for more on the trail system). Salsa set up a deal with Western Spirit Cycling Adventures to take us (the lucky individuals who got to sample the new bikes) riding and camping for three days and two nights.

The first day we left Minneapolis and arrived a few hours later at the trailhead, applied sunscreen and bug spray, ate lunch, then rode bikes. I had the chance to ride the Big Mamma. The trail was tight, twisty, rocky, and in some spots, swoopy. The Big Mamma was a new experience for me as I hadn’t ridden a full suspension 29 inch wheeled bike. The bike handled better than I had expected—begging to be monster-trucked through the rock gardens and leaned into corners. The first ride was roughly ten miles. After the ride we packed up the bikes and headed to the camp site. There we set up our tents and ate dinner. After dinner we had chocolate fondue with fresh fruit as a dessert (Western Spirit fed us amazing food—especially for being out doors).

I missed hot breakfast the next morning and had to settle for cereal and milk. This day’s ride was scheduled to take five or so hours. I got to ride two bikes this day. For the first half of the ride I rode the El Santo (I was allowed to choose two other bikes aside from the two new ones to ride) then I got to ride the El Kaboing. To me this bike felt like a younger, more hyperactive sibling to the Big Mamma. The bikes had the same personality, but a different attitude. The El Kaboing liked to be jumped and maneuvered more so than the big wheeled Big Mamma, which is best off as point, shoot, and ride over everything kind of bike. I also learned a valuable lesson during this ride—mosquitoes easily bite through spandex. I’ve decided baggy shorts are a good idea for areas such as this. Post ride dinner was fajitas and guacamole—simply awesome. After dinner we enjoyed some good brews and tequila courtesy of Salsa.

The next day we packed up then rode one last time before heading back to Minneapolis for showers and one last dinner out with the Salsa crew and their families.

All said it was a more than great week of riding fun bikes, eating awesome food, drinking good beer (and tequila), and making new friends!

It’s late Sunday night and I’ve just rolled back from a three-day road trip to western New York. Rather than sifting through a stack of press releases, looking for a newsworthy nugget to post in this space, I’ve decided to tell you about my trip.

Early Friday morning I pointed the trusty Windstar north, with my ultimate destination being the Raccoon Rally in Allegany State Park near Salamanca, NY. But before I rolled into The Rally, I wanted to sample the sweet singletrack in nearby Ellicottville, NY. Fortunately, Dennis Baldwin of the Ellicottville Bike Shop was kind enough to agree to slip out of the shop on Friday afternoon and share the local goods. Here’s a picture of Dennis, before he got all muddy at the Raccoon Rally XC race on Sunday:

It had been a few years since I last attended the Raccoon Rally, and I found this year’s action bigger and better than ever. There was a good turnout for Saturday morning’s road race, downhill and trials events. I didn’t partake in the competition, as I was hunkered down in the vendor expo area, a.k.a. Raccoon Alley. Fortunately, Saturday afternoon’s short track XC ran right down the middle of Raccoon Alley, so I was able to snap a few photos of the action. Click on the thumbnails below to see larger photos.

On Saturday evening the venue got hammered by a downpour that packed enough rain to turn Sunday’s XC race into quite the muddy affair. Again, I was on booth duty, so I was spared the mud bath. The sloppy conditions did provide an endless supply of muddy bikers, who were kind enough to pose for the camera.

This gentleman won my award for the best T -shirt slogan of the day:

The kids race followed the XC action. From the looks of determination (and joy) on these little bikers’ faces, I’d venture to say there may be future champions in this crowd:

After the kid’s race, the local radar was showing a line of severe thunderstorms heading our way, so I took my cue to bust down the booth and re-pack the van for a hasty exit. I got everything packed up and hit the road before the deluge arrived, but there were a few white-knuckle moments on my drive back to Pittsburgh. I made it home unscathed; however, I noted several weather-induced accidents on the way. At least the rain made for cool temperatures—perfect for late night blogging.

We invite you to join us at the Dirt Rag World Tour stop at the Kenda Bikefest Presented by Dirt Rag, scheduled for July 25–27th in Hancock, MA. If that’s not in the cards, then we’ve got dozens of events listed from coast to coast. Check out the action!

–Karl Rosengarth

Here we are back from the wilds of Canada and happy to report that Mountain Biking is alive and well amongst our neighbors north of the border.

This weekend at Chico Racing’s 24 Hours of Summer Solstice we were treated to a slice of what Ontario and greater Canada have to offer in way of great biking trails and singletrack. Albion Hills Conservation Area, just an hour north of downtown Toronto, is 446 hectares (1102 acres) of rolling woods and pine forest converted from uncultivated farmland. We pre-rode the largely singletrack course on Friday with the Princeton Tech team who were on hand through race night to supply support for their light rentals. The course wound it’s way through the park, scaling up to the ridges and dropping back down to the lowlands to several bridged river crossings. It offered up a nice variety of challenges with fast twisting drops and rebounds that were reminiscent of pump tracks and peppered with clean quick straight-aways to open up and make time.

Adam Ruppel and his team of workers and volunteers have done an excellent job of creating a well organized event (the largest 24-hour race in North America) without loosing the spontaneity that allows for giving prizes away for the best bootie shake, a animal show with a barn owl and snake (in separate cages, of course), Chico’s Pirates of Albion mud pit challenge for riders and Misfit Cycles Dance Party stop on course.

Families were in attendance and the Shimano Youth Series offered a tough course for the next generation and young bikers eagerly stepped up to the challenge.

We buckled down to business on Saturday spending the morning spreading the Dirt Rag and handing out Platypus Big Zip bladders, Genuine Innovations Nano CO2 inflators, Jagwire shift and brake cable kits, and Seal Line Urban totes to new and renewing subscribers. Noon start time saw a lull in the business and Justin took the time to snap some pictures of the of the teams en masse on an absolutely beautiful Canadian blue sky day…

…that turned a little grey and rainy later. By nightfall the riders were faced with heavy downpours, mud slicks and other night hazards. Luckily the lightening, feared to shut down the course, held off until late Sunday. Instead, lightening and pea sized hail, shut down traffic across all four lanes on the QEW while drivers struggled to cram as many cars as possible under the sheltering overpasses.

On a personal note, I have a renewed sense of respect for all participates in endurance racing. This weekend was a new experience for me and there were moments that will stay with me. Waking in my tent to early predawn mist and fog on Sunday, listening to riders sweep by and downshift as they approached the final small climb to the finish line is lingering moment of sweetness in an epic weekend.

Check out our photo gallery. Words by Amanda Zimmerman.
Photos by Justin Steiner.

The IMBA Summit is the biannual international gathering of mountain bike advocates, this year held in lovely Park City, Utah. With around 350 advocates in attendance, it’s a virtual who’s who of advocacy.

Wednesday Night’s opening ceremonies took place at Olympic park, where a team of top-level freestyle skiers put on a show for us while we ate, drank and schmoozed, bombing down giant training jumps and getting huge air into a pool of water while we watch.

But the first jumper was none other than Mike Van Abel, Executive director of IMBA. This may have seemed like a silly stunt, but for me it typified the bold audacity that has gotten us mountain bikers so much success in the advocacy arena.

Thursday morning, and I grab breakfast and sit down next to Philip Keyes, head on NEMBA and Dirt Rag’s access editor. Little did I know that I’d also be sitting with Kozo Shimano, president of Shimano and Mary Bomar, the director of our National Park Service. Big company.

Thursday morning’s keynote was by John Burke, the head of Trek Bicycles. John pointed out several big picture problems and adverse conditions: Obesity, traffic congestion, the move of humans into the urban areas, and the environment.

Problems? No, Opportunities! Burke’s positive thinking really got the crowd going, and really energized us to go out and do our good deeds.

Trek has stepped up in a big way. They are taxing themselves $10 for each full suspension bike sold. That amounted to $350,000 last year, which was given directly to IMBA to build more trails. Burke then challenged all the other bike companies to step up as well. This would generate ten times as much dough, 3.5 million to build trails! John was not shy regarding his ulterior motives for such funding. More trails equals more sales! Any bike industry types out there listening? Up for the challenge? (Yes! Cannondale would be the next summit attendee to step up, with commitments announced the following day. Others companies are sure to follow, many other companies have been setting the pace with IMBA since the beginning).

After the morning Kumbaya, we all headed off to the various sessions, all designed to make us better advocates. Sessions on everything from urban bike park building to national wilderness issues are covered, but since I was here representing my local group, PTAG, I attended a seminar on successful grassroots organizing.

There would be lunch, then two more rounds of afternoon sessions. Sustainable trails, club leadership, effective communication, risk management are some of the other topics to be covered. So many opportunities, it was difficult to decide which to attend.

After filling one’s brain to the top with all the great ideas flowing through the halls, there’s only one way to top off the day, a ride on Park City trails. Out to Bob’s Basin, stay tuned…

[Click here for photo gallery].

On the Dirt Rag World Tour, sometimes the opportunity presents itself to participate as well as spectate at an event. When Granny Gear’s 24 Hours of Big Bear came up on the calendar, many of us at the office wanted to do some participating, but we soon realized that somebody would have to man the booth. It’s not all fun and games. Thus it fell to Eric and I to race for Dirt Rag glory as a Duo team, with Andy and Justin doing the racing/booth working combo on a Just for Fun team with the folks from Princeton Tec.

I had wanted to step up my 24-hour racing anyway. Before this race I had done seventeen (yes 17!) 24-hour races, most of them as part of a five-person coed team and a couple with four-person teams. It was time to ratchet up the challenge just on principle. Also I’ve been curious for a while now how I’d do at a longer endurance event, a 100-mile race or something similar, and this fit the bill as an intermediate step.

Only problem was, I hadn’t done much riding. I spent most of April with a sinus infection and most of May with a pinched nerve in my back, so my usual commuting miles had dropped to a new low, and my mountain bikes were only seeing short rides in the local park. I did get in a few good rides in exotic locales thanks to traveling to Sea Otter and other spots for work, but those three or four good rides in two months hardly counted as training. Oh well—this would be a good way to jumpstart the summer season and make up for lost time…hopefully without hurting myself too much.

Oh yes, and there was a particularly hairy deadline the week before the race. Add to that some sleep deprivation in that same week, kicked off by caffeine-containing energy candy that screwed up my sleep schedule in a big way, and I was all set. (Training tip: don’t eat a whole package of Black Cherry flavor Clif Shot Bloks at 8pm, at least until the 24-hour event has actually started.)

The gang here packed up the van and left on Friday to set up the booth and get in on a good camping spot. I decided to go down to Big Bear on Saturday morning, in order to unwind and get ready on Friday. My partner Ron had to take his grandmom to the airport on Saturday morning, from a hundred miles away in Johnstown, so I volunteered to walk the dogs before leaving. While out in the park with the hounds I got a panicked call: the car Ron was to take had a flat tire. Drama and decisions and dirty, sweaty car repair ensued, but Ron made it off with moments to spare and so did I—just enough left at the end of the journey to get out of the car, take my bike off the roof, get dressed, go to the start/finish tent and sign in before Eric came in from the first lap of our effort. Maurice had the best excuse for me: “A wizard is neither early nor late.”

The Big Bear course is a lot of fun. There were some large mud puddles in the first few miles remaining from torrential rains earlier in the week, but they were pretty well rideable, true to Eric’s few rushed words of advice while handing over the baton. The weather was hot and sunny but not as much as back in the ‘Burgh. Adrenaline still pumping from my effort of just getting to the venue, I went out hard and fast, falling in with a couple guys and a gal who all were a hair above me in ability level (perfect strategy for pushing it in a race). The beginning had some great narrow but fast and flowing sections that begged for speed. The last four miles of the course were brutal, though, with rock gardens and climbs and rock garden climbs. The hot and sweaty car-centric morning caught up with me and I began to wobble and flounder. I came back to the start/finish tent totally out of breath and feeling a little shriveled, but with a decent lap time, fast enough that Eric wasn’t there yet to meet me.

Going into the race I hadn’t really thought we’d be competitive, and in fact I made sure it was cool with Eric if I ended up feeling crappy and being a leaky cylinder in our two-cylinder engine. When Bruce, Granny’s tirelessly cheerful announcer, gave me a welcome over the speakers as a “Duo Pro,” I corrected that to “Duo Not-So-Pro.” Mistakes ensued on the next three laps: not eating enough, not using the suspension seatpost I’d brought to soften up my carbon-fiber hardtail race rig early enough, talking on the phone too long and missing a transition. I didn’t even bother to look at the standings until after my fourth lap, sometime around 2 a.m. Lo and behold—holy crap! We were in second place! Behind none other than Dirt Rag’s back-in-the-day Fiend Racer, Gunnar Shogren! Well then, time to pay attention and not lose our 45-minute gap on the third place team.

I had asked Eric if he thought he could handle doubling up on the next laps, to allow me to catch a few Z’s and come out stronger in the morning, and he agreed. One flaw in that strategy (obvious now, of course) is that Eric didn’t have the time between laps to fix things and eat and rest himself. When I dragged myself up at the carefully calculated end of nap-time and went back to the start/finish tent, I found out that Eric had only left on his second lap an hour before, and when we made the transition, the third placers had crept up to within five minutes of us. Hoo boy, the race was on.

By the time I was done with my fifth lap, which seemed like an epic, hours-long battle, the time difference had increased barely a minute. Our competitors had realized what was up by this time and went out after Eric hard, passing him early in his last lap. Unknown to me, while I kept fighting just to keep my eyes open even while chatting with folks in the tent, he battled back on the uphills, and had a slightly panicked look coming in for the switch, apparently moments ahead of our rivals. “Get him on the hills!” was all I heard from his rushed advice.

I went out feeling like a zombie. The initial slightly rocky section felt like it took hours, and I wasn’t sure if the usual rush from negotiating the fun-n-fast course was going to revive me this time. Sure enough, while still within earshot of the tent, I heard the announcer say the number of our rivals, and moments later, a way-too-fresh rider in a blue jersey with the dreaded number zoomed past, doing a couple gratuitous jumps off of rocks just ahead of me. Total dejection ensued. A minute later I spotted Carol out on her last lap, in the lead for the solo women’s race, along with Maurice keeping her company. I said something like, “I just got passed for second place,” and not sure if I was hallucinating, I heard Maurice ask in response what music they should listen to. “Led Zeppelin!” was all I could bring to mind (the last thing we had listened to back at camp).

It was then that I had a change of mental state. I realized I could just go on being defeated already, barely a mile into the last 13-mile lap, or I could hang on, think positively, and hope for a mechanical, bonk, or some other such fate for the rider in blue ahead of me (barring any permanent bodily harm, of course). Eric’s advice came back, and I began to think that perhaps if I just hung on and rode as smoothly as I could, then threw it all out there on the uphills, I could catch him. I began to think of the recent Stanley Cup playoffs, in which our Pittsburgh Penguins had lost a tough battle in the finals against the Detroit Red Wings. What would Gary Roberts do? Give up with almost a whole game left in the series? Hell no.

So I hung on. I concentrated on being smooth—“flow like water, flow like water, flow like water”—since there was still quite a lot of water on the course and joining with it rather than fighting it seemed like the best strategy. I still fell into a mud puddle that was deeper than it looked, but enjoyed the cooling effects rather than getting mad. I survived the nasty, long downhill section without crashing and got another mental boost from that victory. Next were the uphills, and the race series never had a more appropriate name to me, as I made full use of the granny gear to get up without burning out too quickly. I thought I spotted the rival rider in blue and fought up an incline I had walked on all my previous laps, only to find an unknown rider in a jersey of a slightly different shade. It gave me confidence, though, since this same guy had also passed me early in the lap—maybe my rival, too, was running out of gas. All kinds of calculations and scenarios churned through my head and seemed to aid my legs in churning on the cranks.

Sure enough, there he was—trudging up a slope that wasn’t all that steep, head down. I’m not sure if he saw me as I passed, standing on the pedals and fighting to keep traction. I was afraid to look back until I had put a few hundred yards behind the hill and by then he was out of sight. Yeah! A new rush of adrenaline kept me cranking hard up the last remaining hills, which seemed even longer than the other five times up, but for once I was glad for that. I was still afraid he’d catch up with superior skills on the flat but technical ending sections. I had visions of an elbow-flinging duel in the final turn into the tent, one I would surely lose. But no—the tent came into sight and I was in! Second place was ours, and the sweetest second place I’ve ever had.

Thanks to Granny Gear for putting on another great race, and to Team Czech Made for being great rivals.