Well today was my second day on the hill and I’m having loads of fun. I hooked up with my friend Leah today, she’s out here working for the season so it was good to have someone in the know to ride with, having met up with her in South park we moved up to the Forest Trail just off the Main Unbound. (Mammoth has 3 parks – Main Unbound, South Unbound & Family Fun)
Unbound is way too scary to contemplate at the moment, especially when you consider that so far this holiday my kicker riding is somewhere around the flailing monkey level.
Having played in South yesterday on some reasonably sized small kickers, I went back today expecting to continue building my confidence and working on some grabs and possibly even spins. So riding through first of all to scope out the kickers and landings (an essential part of riding the park in my opinion) I was a touch gutted to find that the kickers had grown overnight. So now instead of 8 nice sized practice kickers there were a couple of bigger ones (not mega huge like the other kicker line, just bigger than I wanted) thrown in….not only that but they had evil, hardcore knuckles on them. On hitting the kickers on my next run through another problem became apparent, after 2 nice size warm up kickers you had the 2 bigger kickers with knuckles, so having landed in the knuckle area on the first one I took more speed into the second, this was fine, unfortunately the following kickers weren’t quite as big so I almost ended up over shooting the landing. It was all getting a bit tangled to be honest trying to get the speed right and not flail too much in the air. On the brightside at least I wasn’t the only one struggling, everyone was in agreement that they just weren’t quite right.
Unfortunately for The Boyf on his second run through he twisted his ankle on one of the landings putting himself out for the rest of the day.
It was at this point that Leah arrived and we headed back over to Main Unbound, after getting The Boyf to the Main Lodge so he could rest his ankle, Leah and I headed back up to the top of Main Unbound. This is a proper pro park with immense kickers and some nice looking rails, the rails look potentially doable once I’ve got used to hitting stuff at speed and doing proper jump on stuff, the kickers are likely to remain untouched by me this holiday. Taking the run to the right of the park you reach the Forest Trail were they have a nice line of kickers in 3 sizes, then at the end of these you cut left into the Super Duper Pipe. Having only had about 5 runs in the pipe at the Brits last year (and 2 at MK indoor slope) I can hardly be called an accomplished pipe rider, but with some pointers from Leah I gave it a go. It felt pretty nice and after a few runs I was starting to get some confidence on the frontside wall, this may have been to so with the fact it was slightly slushy from the sun, the backside wall was shadowy, ice wall hell though so I wasn’t quite feeling the love.
I have a feeling that the next few days will consist of laps of the Forest Trail kickers and the pipe, I’m looking forward to getting settled and trying some new stuff.