Snow-Coulee; March 24, 2011

Me pointing my own helmet-cam at myself

We rode the 12 Mile Coulee (downhill from Tuscany, in Calgary) in the dead of winter (errr, March).  You see, the goal was to get out with the studded tires and shred the frozen creek.  The miscalculation we made was that it got warm at the beginning of the week, then snowed for the rest of the week, then got cold.  So, what we ended up was just a great big bloody trudge!  I showed up with knee pads and elbow pads, expecting to crash on solid ice, but I never got to try it out.  You can tell from the picture how pleased I am, however, so you know it wasn’t a loss.

Video after the break.

Seriously, it was a really fun, kind of hilarious trudge down the coulee…  On average, we were plowing through about 6 inches of snow, quite often on top of thin ice sheets that would bust through every once in a while.  Dangerous, you would think?  Not so!  You’d break through, and then there was just a bunch of air underneath, and more frozen creek beneath that.  So, it ended up being just a giant pain in the butt.  Like I said though, a hilarious pain in the butt!

The weather was actually quite pleasant, at around -5 degrees Celsius.  It was also foggy (which is hard to tell from the video), and we got a pretty good city-glow to see by, even if we were to turn our lights off.  We really worked up a sweat doing this too, it was a lot of hard work.

Highlights include:

• The hilarious creek-riding ending in a cracked pit of ice.
• Constantly pushing six inches of snow.
• Having your back tire constantly swing out to the right as the trail falls off a cliff.
• Pushing useless 194-stud tires (extra weight!) through six inches of snow (hence the uselessness… creek on its own would be fun!)
• Watching Migo wipe out on a jump feature (even he though it was hilarious)

(Youtube disabled my awesome soundtrack.  Hopefully they re-add it as they’ve never had a problem with the music I’ve put in there before.  Not like I’m trying to post MP3s of these songs or nothing!!  The lawyers in charge of this nonsense can kiss my butt.)