After a spate of rides where non-standard people have been in attendance, we were back to a more regular foursome for Saturday's adventure. This is particularly annoying for me, because I know for a fact that Duncan is a cyborg, Rich dissolves red cordial and amphetamines into his camelback before a ride, and Mel's pharmacology PhD research is just a front, allowing her time to develop the perfect undetectable performance enhancing drug. With nobody else to hold them back, these three ride up hills much too fast.

To affirm the problem, we selected another new ride from the ORCA book, called "Paul's Range Plummet". The word "Plummet" had particular appeal to it, until I noticed that the ride start is at the bottom of the escarpment, and the track notes begin with instructions to get on your bike and climb firetrail for 8km.

I've been thinking lately that it is a Good Thing for new riders to ride with those more experienced and conditioned. It gives the experienced riders a fun cruisy ride, and gives the new riders a thorough workout. Enough of these rides, and the new blood will be keeping up with the old.

Putting this theory into practice (substituting "unfit" for "new"), I decided to do my best to stick with the others on the climb. I did okay, but was close to bonking by the time we got the the road at the top. Luckily, we were now more or less at the top of the mountain. The tracks also started to get a bit technical, meaning Mel slowed right down, and I was no longer the achilles heel of the group.

The ride back down was great fun. It was firetrail and a bit undulating, but the ups were short and sweet, allowing for even more downs than we had earnt with the climb at the start. The steep parts of the track redefine waterbars, having instead water trenches about a metre deep and two wide. Not great for big airtime, but a buzz to hit with a bit of speed. Wash off as much speed as the rocky surface will allow, release the levers and just let your bike drop into the trench and up the other side. The plummet itself was great fun: a really steep, erroded rocky track about 300m long, with an off-camber hairpin halfway down for bonus excitement.

We took a wrong turn (again) somewhere, but managed to find our way out of the bush and onto the road back to the car. A quick exploration of some singletrack led us to a disused quarry where trail bikers have had some fun. There seemed to be plenty of singletrack branching off from the firetrail we were riding, so some more exploration may be in order.

We were back to the car by 2:30 or so, and since we were so close to Mt St Leonard it was deemed necessary to go for a few rim runs. The "Rim Run" track, as it is known, is a super-fast 8km firetrail, which loses about 400m over this distance, and has two stupid-fast sections. There is a vaguely parallel road, which is used for shuttling riders and bikes back to the top. The rim run is one of the primary arguments for putting big big rings on a MTB, and for having a maximum speed memory on your computer. I also had a couple of photos I wanted to try.

Duncan drove the first run. I took a fairly uninspiring series of photos of Rich on the first fast section (click the photo on the left to see the series), and picked a site to shoot the second fast section on the next run. My maximum speed was a shade under 80km/h, on the second section.

Mel was driving the second run. This would have been really difficult for her if Rich hadn't turned around and ridden back up the first couple of hundred metres to give her the car keys. The first radar trap gave me my personal best ever, clocking in at 81.7km/h. I got Rich and Duncan to wait while I got set up for the second shoot (I hit 79.5 on my way down). Again, I only caught Rich on film, but the poor light confused my camera and it didn't work very well. I'd love to take my SLR riding, but I'd hate to land on it...

The last part of the track was great fun. We took off down the straight, then formed a sort of drafting line as we weaved though the corners. The track is fairly popular with walkers and horses, and one of the latter had left a big pile of fertiliser in the middle of the track, on a twisty ~50km/h section. I saw it in front of Rich, and we both hopped it cleanly. Duncan was right behind me, and opened his lungs with three choice words, two of which are quite unprintable: the first was "You".

The track opened up around a corner, and a young family of walkers stood by and watched as we flew past. I hope they didn't think Duncan was referring to them...

I slipped past Rich on the inside of the first of the switchbacks at the bottom, and he took the lead back on the last.

How ever many times we ride it, the rim run is the source of big grins every time.

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