Death Ride Prologue - Fun at Altitude

Why do the Death Ride? 130 miles and 15,000 feet of climbing - what's the point? Three of us (Blair, Bill Buckingham and I) decided to try it this year (well, Blair and Bill decided months ago, and I just decided two weeks ago, without any further training). We regularly do 5000-7000 feet of climbing on our rides around Marin, but this is WAY more riding - long miles, altitude and lots more altitude. But we rationalize that it's "only" about a 65 mile ride of climbing - the rest is downhill...

We drove up on Thursday (the "ride" is on Saturday morning) to get acclimated to the altitude. Bill's house is at Kirkwood, and is a great base of operations at about 7800 feet altitude, so we're getting good hypobaric treatment here. Both the accomodations and the scenery are really unbeatable, so I guess we could just hang out and skip the ride....but we won't.

Bill's little cabin in the mountains

View from the living room (6 AM)

We did have a good day today - first an adventure trying to meet up with some of Blair's friends who were staying in a yurt (yes, a yurt). This particular yurt was owned by Tim, a friend of Blair's who actually works for Apple, and comes up here on the weekends.

Tim's yurt- it gets 20 feet of snow here in the winter

It's about 3 miles up a VERY rutted 4WD road, and took some looking (about 45 minutes) for us to finally locate it. But it was worth it - unbelievable views from the front deck, with no one around for miles.

View from the front deck of the yurt

After hanging out for awhile, we elected to head down to Markleeville, and get registered for the ride. We ran into a few more riders who Blair and Bill knew, got more tips on how to (and how not to) do the ride successfully. The summary is "ride slow, and eat/drink a LOT"

We headed out to Blue Lake road which is halfway up Kit Carson pass - one of the five passes we are to ride tomorrow. Our ride was pretty mellow - just to get us acclimated to the altitude. It felt pretty bad for the first 15-20 minutes, but then evened out - we did about 20 miles with about 1200' of climbing (from about 7100 feet to 8300 feet). Felt a lot better at the end, and I think we're ready to go for Saturday morning.

That's it for now - we'll post pictures and stories after the ride - wish us luck!