Drip, drip, drip….. whoosh! Without warning, our warm breezy night beneath the stars immediately turned into a soggy wet downpour. I struggled to unzip my sleeping bag, grabbed my Therm-a-Rest, and ran inside the hut. Our plan to sleep peacefully al fresco quickly morphed into a night spent tossing and turning on the hut dining room floor, listening as the 70+ mph wind, rain, thunder, and lightning took no mercy on anything in its path. So it goes with the notoriously fickle weather in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Adventures
As I hopped off to push my rental Corratec X-Vert Motion up yet another hill, I quickly came to realize that mountain biking in Southern Germany is not exactly the same as mountain biking in San Francisco. Located in the heart of the Bavarian Alps, the small metropolis of Garmisch-Partenkirchen sits beneath the Zugspitze Massif, the highest mountain in Germany at 2962 m or 9718 ft above sea level. Most trails rise quickly and steeply out of the valley, and with a less than ideal bike to match the conditions, I needed to veer my expectations towards maximum fun factor not maximum distance or vert.
“No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules,…
It’s something all SF mountain bikers dream of—mile after mile of purpose built singletrack not to be shared with horses, hikers, or photo snapping tourists. I went in search of this dirt utopia up along the Lost Coast of California. Around 3 ½ hours north of the city, the Lost Coast is a remote and mostly undeveloped portion of Northern California.
Last week, during the cold snap that blanketed much of the country, NW Alpine founder…