Whistler Bike Park - Day 2 #

2022-09-29 #

This morning was met with more excitement than anticipated. I was walking back from breakfast at a local coffee shop when I heard something in the bushes. I looked to where the noise was coming from and it was a black bear. I calmly kept moving and pulled out my phone but kept moving away from it. I needed to round the corner of the lodge where it was and then I noticed that it was not alone. I think it was a mom with at least one cub munching on the trees.

After I made into into my lodge, I used the phone in the lobby to call the main lodge and let them know about the bears. I figured someone should know just so guests aren’t bumping into them as they’re trying to leave the building. From there it was time to pack up the car and check out of the hotel. I drove over to Whistler Bike Park and realized I suddenly had a problem. I didn’t have a secure place to store my bike while I would be out riding on the rental. I asked the staff at G1 if there was any secure storage and there isn’t. So, rolling the dice, I just locked my bike to the rack in a semi-private parking garage. There was a chance of rain in the forecast and the resort reflected this. It was near empty. To be fair, it’s the end of the season and the middle of the week. I might have had to wait for maybe 1 possibly 2 chairs the whole day.

This lets you really pack in a lot of runs in a short amount of time. Me being me and never taking a break, I did a lot. I warmed up on some familiar stuff that I was riding the day before like B-Line. Then I started to adventure into some more of the technical runs. The technical runs get into man made and natrual drops. This would be in the form of plank runs out to a drop or rolling steep rock faces. There were also lots of plank bridges which are a lot of fun to me. On any turns, they’ve also put down some metal grating to give you traction so you don’t slide off. Near the end of my time there I took the Garbanzo Lift up to the higher runs. The fall colors were on display up that way.

At the top of this lift I took Blue Velvet back down. Talking to a local on the lift earlier, he said that the resort was in really rough shape this year. Staffing hasn’t bounced back yet from COVID restrctions and similar. This run is really rough and it’s likley what caused me to rub my thumb raw. After finishing out this run, I rolled right into A-Line, which is famous for a reason. It’s awesome! The jumps get big, like really big. You come over one and then just drop down forever only to send up into the next one. They’re built so well too. While they’re crazy big, you can’t really get into trouble with them. You just need to stay off the brakes and let the bike sail. When you do, you’re in the air for a long time. This part I struggled with. I’m just not used to being in the air that long or having time to think about it. After finishing out that run, I could feel the mounting fatigue and decided to call it a day. While it was early in the day for the rental, I could feel that I was getting close to getting sloppy. So with that, I turned the bike in, loaded the car up ( Stumpyjumper still there ) and headed for Squamish.