Trails on Forbidden Plateau
The gang at the end of Cat Nip
It seems to be where I’m doing most of my riding these days. Not that I don’t like Cumberland, but the trails over on Forbidden Plateau are a bit more challenging, a lot more fun, and you can do them as a shuttle and skip the grueling climb! Not that I’m lazy, but climbing is still a challenge for my ankle… (And my heart and my lungs and… lol)
We decided to do a new twist to a favourite trail last week and rode Cabin Fever as a night ride. What a fun time! It had also been raining quite substantially a couple of days previous so not only was the ride dark, it was wet… I had no idea that a good portion of the XC trail was on an old creek bed. It was good to see water under the bridges again though. However, it was disappointing to see someone had taken an ATV and made a mess of the access trail from the road. We’ll be cleaning that up shortly.
Sunday was a group ride, 5 of us got together and decided to do Gecko, Green Dome, Cabin Fever, Dirty Jane, Black Dog, Transmission, Cat Nip, and of course, Bears Bait. One of the 5 was our newbie, JF. It was awesome to see how much he’s progressed in the month or so we’ve been taking him out. Isabelle took him down 2 Shieks and Cabin Fever on Friday (poor guy was in survival mode from what I heard) so he was more than a little relieved when we showed them the alternate way to get to the trail head! 2 Shieks is one of our DH trails and although a great ride, it can be more than a little intimidating for new riders… On the trails we chose for the ride, JF did a fantastic job. He even showed up the rest of us by riding a sketchy section of trail on Black Dog, which was a very wet and slippery boulder that did in one member of our group. He’s going to kick our butts one day in the very near future!
I’ll let the photos speak for themselves on how great JF is doing and how fun these trails are! (I wrote more about them here and you can get the GPS info here.)
On Monday, I took another friend down Cabin Fever for the first time. It was also part of his reinitiation to mountain biking, he’s just starting to get back on the trails after a 15 year absence. I know the trail quite well and knew that a couple of sections would make his eyes bug out of his head, and they did! However he had a grin on his face the whole time and I think I did a pretty good job of getting him hooked again…
Tags: cabin fever, forbidden plateau, gecko, green dome, mountain biking, mtn biking
mtnbikinggirl’s tweets
October 27th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Hey, I have a technical queston for you: How do you do that “Read the Rest of This Entry” thing? Does it require any sort of plug-in?
If you tell me, I’ll promise not to give you a hard time for shuttling! Honestly, I love all the trees alongside your trails. So much different than here in Arizona - even the foresty parts.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Are you using WordPress? If so, there’s a button that looks like a ripped piece of paper on the “Visual” tab. Click on that where you want the break to happen.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
I’ll check that out. Yes, I’m Wordpress-powered!