Really, this is one of the best things in life. How else could you describe sitting in a deck chair and having some bald gorilla three sheets to the wind launch a 14-pound RC car at your head while all your friends cheer wildly and at the same time brace for impact? Heyliger proves why he is tougher than anyone, while Forrest Arakawa manages to stop laughing just long enough to snap the shutter...

Something about running off to the mountains for a weekend with your friends and families, and convening in a remote place with good food, good bikes, good trails and probably too much booze, that makes for the kind of psychic reset that eludes most of us down in the real world most of the time. Of course, when there’s the added bonus of either fireworks or guns or way too powerful RC cars thrown into the mix, things can get “interesting.”

Anyway, we packed ourselves last weekend up to the Lakes Basin, and to the Graeagle Lodge specifically, for the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s annual end of season ho-down. As in years past, the crew didn’t disappoint. Not one bit. We got to stay here:

And it ruled! (strange-angel with the photo credit)

We got to get a taste of some freshly built trail:

And it ruled too! (strange-angel again...)

The freshly built trail in question was the first taste of a mega-chunk of trail planning and building that the SBTS has slated for the land around Mills Peak, Haskell Peak, Mohawk Valley and the Sierra Valley, that, when finished, will have opened up 45 miles of new singletrack right across Lakes Basin highway from the already established shit-ton of trails that drop toward Downieville. Except these will drop to the east, and the town of Graeagle, where the margaritas are better:

Click to make this legible. Gonna be a whole lot of new trails to explore pretty soon!

While out sniffing around in the land of new trails, we got to leave inspirational trail markings for the more leisurely of our group:

This is how you spell "we love you" with Sugar Pine cones. Strange-angel again with the shot.

And while we were waiting for said loved ones, we had time to soak in the view:

It's probably Enervit, or maybe Gu, in that hip flask. Probably...

There was a whole mess of ass kicking climbing, followed by a whole mess of rocky sweet singletrack, which inevitably included fixing flats in one of the most scenic places on earth:

We ate like kings:

Really, we ate like kings. And Queens:

And eventually, we had to pack up and come home. Which kind of sucked. But at least we got some epic riding in, we learned about some big picture goodness, we had a blast, and we got to take home memories that we wouldn’t have found anywhere else. Heyliger’s dog might not want to remember everything, but hey, so it goes:

No dogs were harmed in the jumping of this RC car... Arakawa-san again

Huge thanks to everyone for another awesome year!