Spring SoCal Single Speed Summit 2005

The SSSSS Event held the weekend of May 14th was pretty freaking cool.  A bunch of great folks and single speed freaks got together for a weekend of single speeding fun and good times around the campsites. The official start the event was Saturday but there was stuff going on Friday through Sunday.  Saturday was the only day I could attend, but it was still awesome out at Noble Canyon.

The day did not start too early as various cohorts gathered at the top of Noble around 9AM

Noble Canyon is not all downhill, there are some required offering to the gravity gods.

    Ahh, the Aquaholic, (Noble-ridus-alotus) a creature indigenous to the Laguna Mountains of Southern California. Frequent encounters with the Aquaholic occur in this area and you are almost guaranteed a sighting on any early weekend mornings at the lower elevations of the range.  This species is believed to travel all about the southwestern United States, but sightings outside of a narrow swath of land between the small mountain hamlet of Pine Valley and the rugged terrain near the rural community of Alpine are rare indeed.   If you come in contact with this creature on the trail, it is best just to calmly step aside as it will usually continue along it way.  If you feel the Aquaholic is about charge and attack, just pull out a camera and it will almost always promptly stop charging and ride over the nearest rock.  If you keep saying, "Geez, I just missed the shot", the creature will repeat the log riding event until it passes out from exhaustion or becomes disinterested and continues along it way.  Either way you will be safe to ride another day.

TD coming down the trail

Ben	2PAAD	Billy	Noslogan	Andy aka Rut
JMH	JMH	Chuky	John	Kristi

Widow Maker - A nice little rocky section just before the Alpine forest turns to desert chaparral.

Drew	Kristi	Billy	Steve	Kristi	Billy

A little further down the trail in the desert scrub

The Stairway To Hell
A nasty little rock garden that can be quite tricky

Some were not content just to ride down the thing, but had to give climbing it a shot

Folks hanging out on Vultures Row at the bottom of the stairway waiting for some carnage.

Here are some shots from the bottom of the trail where you have nice rock obstacles to work with.  I camped out in a corner and watched folks go by.  (I goofed with the camera a bit and got some bad exposures)

Steve	Steve	2PAAD	Billy	Drew	Andy
Ben	Calvin	Calvin	Calvin	John	JMH

Okay the trail party is over, time to climb back up to the top.   We did a bit of pavement climbing before we hit a fire road that took us to the Indian Creek trail.   I was freaking suffering pretty hard on the climb and the extra weight of all my "big" camera stuff was dragging on me. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it) Here are some shots from along the climb up to Champagne Pass.

From Champagne Pass we took the Pine Mountain trail north where we enjoyed some awesome singletrack riding.  This was my first time taking this trail in this direction and I was impressed.  I did not take any pictures in this section as I was doing good just to keep up at this point.  Once the Pine Mountain trail hit Sunrise Highway we took the road back up to camp were some cold Arrogant Bastard Ale awaited us.

Let the Party Begin

Carlos (aka SSLOS) and Tony (aka TD) did incredibly awesome job putting this event together. 

A hell of a campsite

There was some great sponsorship for this event.  Here are just some of the folks who threw down some swag for the event.

First up was cracking the swag keg of Arrogant Bastard Ale.  Actually it was already tapped and operational by the time we got back from the ride.   Guarding camp does have its perks.

Shortly after that JMH won the coveted crash of the day award for some acrobatics performed on the stairway to hell.

TD was the "Master of Swag"

Because one Turner is not enough

Is 2PAAD thinking about a new ride?

Is there a Seven Cycles rig in Billy's future?

I don't think I'll comment on this picture!
 

"Battle of the Log"

Andy was doing a little log riding action and doing a pretty descent job of showing some skills on the log until

 
 Luke "Mr. Extreme" threw down the gauntlet when he told Andy that the only "real" men out here were on fixie trikes so he should just get off of his log "Punk!" So,

Andy accepted the challenge and it was "GAME ON"!  Heat after exhausting heat, Andy made valiant attempts, but Luke kept the pressure on and continually edged out Andy in "Battle of the Log".  Andy was a pretty good sport about the devastating loss, even after Luke proclaimed to the entire summit that Andy was now his personal "Juice Box Beaucth".

Later while Luke was off knapping off the spoils of victory, Aquaholic was seen scoping out Luke's rig while mumbling something about "the kids going down next year", to himself as he went round and round, shaking his head back and forth while counting off random sequences of numbers.  I positioned myself close to a rock and kept my camera ready.

There were a few squirrels around camp who kept trying to hit the keg and snag the trash bags.  After we finally relented and poured them a bowl of the Arrogant Bastard Ale, they pounded it down and crawled under log.  I did not see them again before I left that evening

Last but not least is SSLOS, one of the primary masterminds of summit.  Great job to all the folks who had a hand it putting together the Spring SoCal Single Speed Summit.  It was awesome, and I only got to enjoy one day of it.

Oh Yeah, If you would like a high resolution version of a picture I took of you just shoot me an email.