Backcountry Adventure on Pearl Pass

Photos and words by Samer Khodor

Day 1:  Marble to Crested Butte

Like most rides in Colorado, there’s no warm up. The trails start by going straight uphill. And the 4×4 road leaving the small mountain town of Marble toward Crested Butte was no different. Except that it was steeper than most with some grades over 20%! It felt more difficult than I recalled from my first time riding it in 2007 and I had apparently forgotten the road climbed 800 feet in the first mile!  As my legs and body ached I began to wonder if we should have driven to Crested Butte and saved our legs for the challenge of Pearl Pass the following day. Of course I did not reveal these weak unBelgian thoughts to my poker-faced riding buddies: Sean Malone, Jeff Sillik, Nick Sherwood, and Andrew Sterner.

Continue reading

Finding, Respecting, and Surpassing Limits. CB40 MTB Race

This whole Trail Donkey project has been quite a romp, as I babbled on about in my last writeup on the subject. Now that we’ve ridden the spit out of the rigs, we have a fair amount of confidence in their abilities to convey us, under our own power, just about anywhere we point them. Beyond the typical dirt riding they’ve been seeing, Chris Magnotta notably rode his to 3rd place at the Deer Trail State Champ Road race here in Colorado. The only thing he changed from dirt spec to road spec was the tires. Chris is a bit of a monster rider anyway so we can’t go and say that a Donkey gave him magical powers, but we do think it is satisfying it’s original mission to be “one bike to rule them all”. We aren’t really kidding ourselves, we don’t think that a glorified cyclocross bike RULES other specialized road or mountain bikes in their respective disciplines, but it does road ride better than an MTB, and it does MTB better than a road bike, so we will be generous and playfully allow ourselves to keep using the title, tongue in cheek. Come at us, haters!

Continue reading