I just had a couple classes cancelled, this is as good of a time as any to write this story I suppose. Sally and I go back to Kelowna to visit my parents every year and this time we managed to get a full eleven days due to some timely volcanic activit yin the Aleutians (they were cancelling night flights so we bumped our trip ahead a few days). We spent the week visiting old friends, touring the Okanagan’s burgeoning wine country and I rode bikes a few different times.
One of the highlights of this trip for me was seeing Matt Lindsay for the first time in three years or so. Matt recently moved back from Taiwan with his girlfriend and they have a baby on the way (congrats man). It’s always interesting to watch someone ride after not seeing them for a really long time. Riding with people every day, you don’t notice it too much when they learn new stuff; it seemed like Mat thad a whole new bag of tricks, including really nice tables like the one in the post below.
We were able to hit some old spots as well. I always wanted to do the mall rail in Penticton and even though I never did, seeing Desson do it in person was a treat; he even did it at the end of a line… it’s one of the best clips we shot there and it will be in the video. We made it all the way across town to the hospital rails, only to find them newly capped. these were some of the first rails I ever slid back in the day and it’s amaing that they finally capped them after ten years of good sessions.
Penticton bowl is still amazing and there are a couple photos from that session down below. Desson was airing the hip ridiculously and fell really hard. Also at the park, Mat Ridgeway unleashed a ton of tuck no hande variations, even one that I’ve never seen before. Riding with Mat is always fun because he doesn’t take anything too seriously and does tricks like bunnyhop no footer one handers.
Later in the week I got the chance to session Mat and Ty Zee’s trails, which were amazing. Their trails were completely different than ours, focusing more on flow and easy lines. They built roll-ins, wallrides and quarter pipes to go along with a big set of quads; I could spend days there and not find all the lines. The last day we went there, we got kicked out by park rangers who were about to bring in an excavator to plow the trails; this is the second set of trails to be plowed in kelowna this year and it’s a total bummer that the rangers are on such a plowing rampage. they gave us all the typical lines like “it costs us a lot of money to clean these things up” etc. but showed no intention of wanting to work towards a compromise, it’s ridiculous because as long as the province keeps plowing them, I’m sure the locals will keep building more.
We also rode a bit of street in Vernon, and Desson jumped off a roof! (see below). That spot possessed the most incredible bank to wall I’ve ever set my tires on; Ridgeway did an awesome wallride variation there and we introduced Steve to Tim Horton’s. To finish off the night we rode Winfield park, one of the oldest parks in the Valley which was apparently designed by Sam McKinley to look like a certain part of the male anatomy due to its proximity to the airport landing strip. I learned a trick there, meeting my quota of two for the year.
If you didn’t catch it, there are some screen grabs from the trip below.
