WINTER PARK — The sign, posted only two towers into our first ride up the Olympia Express chairlift, toyed with my frail psyche like a kite in a hurricane.
“Lower the bar,” it said, as if by some cosmic extrasensory decree that read the overly ambitious intentions imbedded in my brain. On only our third lap through Winter Park Resort’s Trestle Bike Park — and my first dedicated downhill mountain biking day of the season — my pedaling partner had convinced me it was time to tackle “Mountain Goat,” the park’s only double-black-diamond trail designed for pro downhill racing.
The sign, apparently, thought it was a bad idea. Or at least that’s how I interpreted the advice until David Yoo instructed me to duck my head while he dropped the lift’s metal safety bar over our laps for the uphill ride. Oh, right, that bar.
“From what I’ve seen you ride so far, you’ll be fine,” Yoo assured me. “Besides, you can walk around anything you don’t want to ride.”
Exactly, I reminded myself mentally while staring jealously at Yoo’s full-face crash helmet and body armor. I once spent a month stumbling around on a fractured foot before visiting the doctor. How much worse could a broken-boned hike down the mountain be?
Besides, we already had done a few warm-up laps down the front side of the 28-mile, mountainwide park, and the open, rolling terrain and banked turns of less demanding singletrack trails quickly reminded me how much I love the thrill of gravity’s pull on a full-suspension mountain bike. After cruising the intermediate Cheyenne Trail over to the appropriately named Long Trail, we dropped into Boot Camp, a black-diamond practice area where riders can hone their skills like a skier or snowboarder lapping the park and ‘pipe in winter.
Laced with arched wooden bridges, tabletop dirt jumps and even a couple of curling wall rides to unleash your G-force potential, Boot Camp takes riders as big as they want to go — up to double-digit bomb drops alongside the off-the- charts challenges of the closed slopestyle course used for last month’s Crankworx Colorado Freeride Mountain Bike Festival.
The progression continued with another lap that included an easy- ish “expert” trail called Lonesome Whistle down to Olympia Express.
“There are a few water-bar kind of hits,” explained Yoo, who rides the Trestle Park as many as three days a week during summer months. “No big deal, but if you go too fast you’ll find yourself in the air.”
Whether real or imagined, I did feel myself flying for much of the trip down the mountain, gaining enough confidence to follow Yoo’s lead to Mountain Goat.
I tried in vain to scout the wooded trail as we cruised over treetops on the lift ride up. I could always bail out at the top and coast back down the front of the mountain on a more familiar trail. And I might have, too, had I not noticed the antithetic sign at the summit telling me to “Raise the bar here.”
Good advice, I thought, just before dropping in.
Ride it: Winter Park recently extended its downhill riding season for the first three weekends of September, including a women’s downhill camp Sept. 6-7 and a junior camp Sept. 13-14. Call 970-726-1556 or visit for info.
