Jackson ICUP and Phillips Canyon

Dave on the Ridge Pass Trail
Teton Village Hostel.
Spacious acccomodations for 7 in the Hostel.
Scott on the race course trail.
KC checking out the map. That's all we had!
Team Mad Dog at the top of Teton Pass. Sorry but when the slow guy is taking the pictures, you don't get many action shots.

I haven't posted in a while cuz I've been riding my butt off preping for the Leadville 100 on Aug 9th. LW has me in a 2-week taper mode now so I'll try and catch up a little.

Mad Dog went to Jackson for the next to the last ICUP race and we had a good result. I won my group (there were only 2 of us) and we had 4 or 5 other winners while the Holley's continued their awesome year with a 1st and 2nd place finish in the pro division. My race went well with only 1 crash and no injuries. We stayed 2 cozy nights in the Hostel, which I understand is being torn down in the near future, so get up there before that part of Teton Village's history is gone. By cozy I mean 7 people in a 10x20, one window box. It was tight!

We rode 9-10 hours total and finished with a semi-epic Sunday. The first ride was up the Old Pass Road to Ridge Pass Trail and down Black Canyon. That was a great ride with long stretches of pavement, buffed single track, beautiful flowers and views of Jackson and a tight, rocky downhill that took us back to the trailhead. We were out about 2 hours.

The second ride was a little more involved, and exciting. We headed back up Old Pass Road past Carter Lake to the parking lot and crossed the new highway to Phillips Canyon Trail. This is where it started to get exciting. As earlier, the flowers and views were magnificant, and the riding was spectacular. All the ingredients for a pleasant ride. We met some trail workers who warned us the trail we were heading to was a work in progress and a bit lumpy. That's an understatement! The uphill was no big deal, but the downhill - yikes! The next 4 miles was white knuckle, rocky, rooty and curvy steep drops that pushed well beyond my comfort level. My tires got swallowed up several times but I was able to keep from going over the bars, barely. KC watched over me after many of the bigger drops and commented how tough the riding was. She got no debating from me.

Here's where the ride got goofy. We finished the descent, with no crashes, other than Tim rolling a deflated tire, and came upon a sign that said "access" and chose to ignore it. Instead of going straight, we went right. Oh boy! It was hot, sunny and we were out of water - and we began to climb again. It got so hot and steep I chose to push my bike for probably 10 minutes. We followed the fire-service road up and up, to where it dead ended, 1,000 feet of climbing above the "access" sign. Chris did a short recon and informed us we were not where we were supposed to be, and that's not good! I started thinking about how much a helicopter rescue was going to be and if we were going to be on the Sunday Night news. And, what we were going to do for water? We had no phone and barely an idea of where we might be. After a short discussion our only option was to go back the way we came up and see what that brings. Well, wouldn't ya know it but that "access" sign was still there and we decided to see where it lead. Within 3 minutes we were on the paved road heading west to Wilson which was 4 miles away. We made it! We stopped at the General Store for water and went back to the trailhead where Keith, Dave and Scott were patiently waiting.

Lessons learned: never go exploring into the unknown with a half full camelback, and "access" means this way out :-)