Day: September 8, 2001

Exciting Title: The Day I Called the Old Bike Out
or
Lame Title: Mountain Biking at the Rock
Sept. 8, 2001
by Pat Cushing

Mike, Alex, and Josh met at my apartment on South Main at about 3:00 on Saturday for a late day mountain biking excursion. Since Alex didn’t have a bike I lent him an old one that I had picked up this summer. As we performed a little tire pressure adjustment in the front yard we talked with my neighbor, Erin the mountain biker, and realized how much we suck, well compared to her. She is good. Damn good. The kind of good that made us want to fly off jumps we had no purpose being on in the first place. So we went to the Rock Garden. For those of you who have never been, there are more rocks per unit area on that trail than parking Nazi’s on JMU’s campus.

After a little bit of riding we discovered that Alex (on my old bike) was nowhere to be seen. Since the place is a maze of trails we figured we would catch up to him sooner or later. When we stopped to take a look around for him we ran across a family hiking in the woods. This is the conversation that followed “You biking?” “Yup” “We lost our friend” “Yea I thought I saw four of y’all”. No sooner did we hear the unmistakable shrieking of brakes and Alex was found. We did some more biking- and exploring. In fact we came upon an interesting sign on a barbwire fence in the woods: “No Trespassing” and figured if it has a sign like that on it there must be something good back there. So we handed the bikes over the fence and played around in the remains of an old rock quarry that is now a place someone stores dirt and asphalt. We found some good jumps on a huge mound of asphalt. Josh went over his handlebars three times, a sure sign of fun. After we got back we went to Luigi’s for some good Harrisonburg pizza, finishing the day with full stomachs.