Hi Everyone

Sorry it’s been a bit since I updated anyone on what Ariel and I and the demo bikes have been up to.

July has been insane.

Ariel went to France and got 13th, top American ever, in the pro field at the Mega Avalanche at Alpe D’huez. Go Ariel! Check this video clip from his 3rd place qualifying run.

ariel’s mega alpe d’huez adventure from abby hippely on Vimeo. Might have to get Ariel to point the camera up a little more, eh? Next time…

Meanwhile, I went to the Downieville Classic, swam in the river, and realized I am not a cross country racer anymore. No going back to the glory days when I won the All-Mountian there in ‘05.

Then it was off to Mountain Bike Oregon (MBO). Check out some pics below.

Most all of our bikes went out all three days of the event. Total we had 50 some odd people try bikes over the weekend.

MBO and PBR good combo!

Dakine posse, Slaven, Ariel

We rolled in to MBO late Thursday night, actually Friday morning (midnight) to the Dakine posse bumpin’ techno, LOUDLY! We realized then, as we were parked across from them all weekend, how it was gonna go. When you can’t fight ‘em, you might as well join ‘em! Here’s the posse riding Moon Point later in the weekend.

After MBO we posted up in Eugene for a few days to wash the bikes and have some office time. We also decided we were gonna do a food tour of Eugene, which has some awesome places to eat.

clean demo bikes, thanks to the Days Inn Eugene

Riding the bike path to dinner. We found this bike path winding along the river in Eugene via our new smart phones, go Droid!

The best tuna tartar/ceviche ever! Red Agave 5th Ave. in Eugene. They make a good Tamarind Margarita too!

After a few days in Eugene we hooked up with our BLM contact outside Portland to pick up a permit to demo at the newly re-designed Sandy Ridge trails 40 miles outside Portland. This was also the site of this past Sunday’s demo day. We took the opportunity to help with some trail building.

Building two tables in an A-line style flow trail at Sandy.

This spot is RAD! If you are in Portland make the effort to get to the Sandy Ridge Trails. BLM land, once timber land, opened to recreational use by Congress. The red tape and trail construction efforts are possible in large part, due to a young BLM employee named Zach Jarrett. He’s under 40, people, a BLM employee, AND a mountain biker!

I’ll leave you all with this painting I saw at this restaurant in Klamath Falls. Bad food, cool art:

Can you see it?

Until next time!

A and A

Garen Becker, above (photo courtesy of the sharp-eyed strange angel, is showcasing the highly evolved scoring system we employed at this year’s Downieville Classic to keep track of the BronsonPeople and their standings in the annual Cannery Cup Bragging Rights All Mountain Gongshow. He may have just gone swimming with the results. That’ll happen sometimes. Anyway, here’s our recap of the weekend. Cliff Notes would be: most awesome Downieville Classic ever, even if They Must Be Giants prevented Weir from crushing everyone and making us look invincible in the process (although Weir did smoke the downhill). Even still, in spite of They Must Be Giants wedging some powerful results up everyone’s crack, the place still looked like a Santa Cruz company town. Couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a Santa Cruz. Good to see…

The overall victory in the Cannery Cup Bragging Rights All Mountain Gong Show went to this man, Scott Chapin (captured here doing his frogman impression, once again by the quick shutter of strange angel). Painful as it may be for everyone else to swallow, he laid a beating on the rest of the workers here in the XC, rolling 31st overall across the line in 2:15:04. The four minute cushion he gained on the fastest of the rest of the Cannery Cuppers was enough to secure his overall victory in the AM, in spite of some mighty solid runs by Hightower and Doss in the downhill. Honorary Cannery Cup racer, Greg Minnaar, ripped out a credible 11th overall for fastest Cannery Cupper in the downhill (”What? Are you trying to tell me that a two time World Champion and current World Cup leader is only good for 11th?” Yep…), but got torched in the XC. Nowhere near as badly as the grim implosion of Nathan Rennie in 2007, the thunderclap of which was heard around the world and thought to be an earthquake at first, but it still left a mark, and Minnaar’s descending skillz weren’t enough to close the gap.

Speaking of Minnaar, dude deserves some props. He’s won two out of three World Cups so far this season, came third with a mechanical at the other, and instead of taking care to avoid any potential mid-season mishaps, he decided to wing it to Downieville, where he managed to bro-down like a true champion. Held his liquor, raced his bike, talked some shit, took some shit, didn’t complain about a damn thing, didn’t pull any “full-pro” behavior like freaking out about special food or sleeping in an oxygen tent, executed a flawless backflip into the Yuba river aboard the BIKE magazine ShitBike, chewed some tobacco, and hung out with the crusty folk to the bitter end.

This right here is the raddest photo in the world. Minnaar, realizing why he would rather be a downhill World Cup winner than an XC racer, Hightower, not too stoked about being beat by Chapin but totally stoked to have Minnaar feeling so much worse than him, and an anonymous female superhero with lightning bolts on her stripey socks reveling in awesomeness. Strange angel with the shot, yet again.

For his part, Chapin used a variety of intriguing training methods to garner his victory, including but not limited to: mosquito blood doping (sitting outside at night with his shirt off, getting bitten by a couple hundred mosquitos), Credence Clearwater Revival meditation (sitting outside listening to a whole lot of Credence, with shirt off, being bitten by mosquitos), and heroic amounts of canned Budweiser (shirt off, mosquitos on, Credence, etcetera…).

For the rest of us, it was pretty much Downieville as usual:

For the parting shot, we leave you with the last place Cannery Cupper, (s)Will Dixon, who took his punishment like a man. He would like it on record that while he trailed the other Cannery Cup Bragging Rights All Mountain Gong Show contestants in both the XC and the DH, he did so on flat pedals, which should (in his mind) open up a victory in the flat pedal division. Which Does Not Exist. The fitting final image courtesy of Kelley Richardson: