Costa Rica – Coast to Coast

I just returned from a fun and challenging little adventure (arranged through BikeHike.com) where a group of eight of us made our way across Costa Rica from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean entirely under our own human power… and a fair amount of gravity assist!

We started in Quepos, on the western coast, and we proceeded to bike, hike, raft and kayak our way entirely across the country until we reached the eastern coast and the Caribbean.  We mostly camped at sites along the way and a support vehicle carried our gear but we otherwise made our way from one coast to the other.  Along the way, we encountered (or sometimes befriended) caiman, monkeys, sloths, toucans, turkey vultures, frogs, bats, snakes and some biting fish, as well as numerous insects including various spiders, ants, butterflies and a particularly aggrieved, giant grasshopper.

Click on through for my gallery of photos and videos from the trip:

   

More Mtn Biking near Truckee

Here’s some pictures from two days of mountain biking near Truckee, CA with Richard on Oct 4-5th. First day was Mills Peak, near Graeagle.  It’s a long but pleasant nearly three-hour climb to the top and the fire lookout tower and a very fun one hour ride back down.  The second day we did the “Super-D” trail from Watson Lake down to the 06 fire road south of Truckee.

        

There’s a great panoramic view from atop Mt. Watson, looking south over Lake Tahoe:

Santa Cruz Blur TRc demo ride

I’ve been happily riding my old Santa Cruz Superlight since I got it way back in 2001.  I’ve never been too interested in keeping up with all the yearly new bike tech and I get pretty bored with all the bike talk at many ride meetups.  (nerp derp berp)  I just like to ride on da trails!  So I had yet to try tubeless or Propedal or dropper seats or any new geometries and shocks.  I didn’t even get around to disc brakes until like 2010 – and I had to get new hubs and wheels to do it.  However, somehow the most recent batch of talk about new bikes among friends and other riders finally got me to go try a demo of something a little more… modern.

With a little bit of research, the Santa Cruz Blur TR Carbon caught my interest and I even managed to find an XL available for demo — not the easiest size to find anywhere!  This is their recent “Trail” version of the Blur introduced last year as something between the Blur XC and Blur LT.  Here’s a great video explanation of why Santa Cruz made this bike.  So I took it out on some very familiar trails in Wilder Ranch yesterday….

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