Fish Creek Ride 1

Fish Creek Park is apparently the largest Provincial (state) park in Canada and it is right by my temporary hotel/work and it has miles of single track (off road) mountain biking. Unfortunately, I got off tempo with my Hero and missed a lot of the good parts. The upside is these guys go every Thursday night so I'm sure I'll get better footage. In the mean time here are the highlights of what I did get:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JitQPas9Fn4

                                             (Music: Blue Blood Blues by The Dead Weather)

Mount Fullerton Excursion

Mount Fullerton is a mountain within the Canadian Rockies about 45 min East of Calgary in Kananaskis Country/Elbow Sheep Wildland. Its peak is at 8950' and the climb up to it is 3900'. We began at approximately 10 a.m. Mountain Time. We rode our bikes down an old fire trail for a bit until we had to start our ascent. We carried the bikes with us along some switchbacks until we reached a dry creek bed. We followed this along for awhile until it was too hard to ride the bikes. We stowed them and continued on to the base of the mountain where we had a light lunch at 12:30 p.m. It was a very rocky, steep climb so we took lots of short breaks. We took a more circuitous route through some slippery shale and finally achieved the summit about 4:00 p.m. Here's proof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsj97GujdGU&feature=plcp

(youtube won't let me upload it straight here because of copyrights)

It took us half the time to get down, but we stopped to refill our water with delicious, frigid glacier water that is pure enough to drink straight out of the stream. We made it back to base about 6 p.m. and back to our bikes by 7. The descent from there was a cake walk because where we carried the bikes before, we rode them now. The video is a little shaky because as you can see there were large rocks and roots everywhere. You only get HD if you watch it in the little box, but you still get the gist if you blow it up:

Music: Don't Slow Down by Matt and Kim

We reached the trail head soon after at 8:30 p.m.

EDIT

(From closest in clockwise order) Dietrich and Edelgard (no idea if they are spelled right, German cousins of the amazing Monica Biensch), Jared 'Ringo' Brown (nephew of the Biensch's), Monica herself who cooked an amazing waffle breakfast to kickstart the day, Me, Ethan Biensch.

The gang: Ringo, Bill Biensch, Me, Ethan

That is what the video above is of, and we carried our bikes all the way up it.

Amazing little dried creek bed and you can see the smoothed out face where the water has worn the rock down.

Of course we had to get in it.

Close to the base. The peak in the hazy background is where we are going.

Lots of mini breaks to keep up our strength, this one included snowballs

Another mini break.

The view from a little over halfway up

The GERMAN apple

Reppin the Titans.

Me from the backside a little after where the climbing video starts.

The summit

And our view

This is the right way down. The way we took up was the more dangerous and difficult way. We just couldn't see the trail from our vantage point even though the guide book said it was "obvious"

Half way down in half the time, and we refilled our water in a crisp, clean glacier stream.

I purchased a GoPro HD Hero 2 to take video evidence of all the things I do. I experimented with it on my way from Omaha, Nebraska, USA to Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I don't like videos without sound so unless there is something profound on the video, I'll usually add music to drown out obnoxious noises or the sound of me talking to myself. Here is approximately 1500 miles in 40 seconds:

Music: Ginders by Matt and Kim

This blog is a chronicle of my adventures for your viewing pleasure and my memory. I hope you find it inspirational.