Mouthtrap - 4/2
Full Moon Over the Slag Heap

Well, March sure as tootin' came in like a lion. We got more snow and rain this month than I think we did all winter leading up until now. Went down to the Sea Otter and, as always, came home with flayed skin that looks just like sunburn but can't really be because the sun never came out. Windburn is my guess. That, or there's a local depletion of the ozone layer right above the Laguna Seca racetrack, which would go a long way toward explaining the numerous times I've been burned to a crisp even in drenching rain down there.

She may have come in like a lion, but at least around here she's going out right on schedule like a lamb. Temperatures are supposed to hit the 80s by this weekend, and the rivers are all thundering with snowmelt. The ground is almost firm enough to ride on, and last night I rode home from the post office under a full moon in a T-shirt. Summer will be beating us down before we know it&

Down at the Sea Otter, I ran into many of the folks I'd been touring with in Chile last November. That's some of them in the photo. There is no way to explain what is going on there, other than a lot of booze and a few bike parts were involved. The helmets were necessary.

There's going to be a story about the whole Tubedance in the Andes in the magazine one of these days, but running into everyone just filled me up with good vibes and made me want to ramble on about it a bit here. This guy, Dave Campbell, had been calling me for about a year, raving about the riding in Chile and how I was missing out on one of life's great adventures if I didn't go on one of his tours. (You can see him in the photo background. He's the blond guy slipping to one side under the spell of a pretty hefty Pisco buzz. That, or he's still blissed out from having his nipples waxed by some of the girls earlier that night&) He'd originally gone down there in the mid-'90s to do a Spanish-language immersion, and had fallen in love with the place. Now he runs tours there, more for fun and the ability to go back repeatedly than for anything else.

Now, bear in mind that I have a healthy distrust of strangers, especially groups of them, in addition to having heard every single "Dude, you gotta come here! The riding's epic!" kind of come-on ever uttered. So I wasn't exactly overflowing with anticipation. But Dave kept after me. Kept sending me photos. Kept telling me stories. Just kept chiseling away at us until finally photographer John Gibson and I found ourselves in Chile one Sunny November morning, shaking hands with a dozen people we'd never seen before. I was still pretty filled with trepidation, envisioning some sort of wussed-down, handholding, candy-ass, mostly pavement dawdle that would have me grinding my teeth in frustration every inch of the way.

Boy, was I wrong! Somewhere on the second day--the day that Santos was the first guy (but not the only one) on the trip to go down with heat exhaustion--in the middle of this ultra-sick, technical frenzy of rock-riding in this spectacular river valley in the middle of just about nowhere, Dave looked over at me, sweat dripping off his face, and laughed, "This ain't exactly yer Napa Valley wine tour, eh?" That night, after Santiago and his brother had stuffed us to the gills on grilled portions of just about every kind of meat imaginable, we all got plastered on cheap red wine, as we had the night before, sitting around a campfire, staring up at the stars of a Southern sky and listening to Canadians singing along to Blue Rodeo songs. I was aching and a little cut up, and we were only two days into the trip.

The remaining six days of riding was hard, epic and staggeringly beautiful. We averaged about 30 miles a day, all of it rocky, at times scary. Did a lot of hiking with our bikes. Saw foxes, went swimming, bathed in hot springs, railed huge downhills and suffered like a dog up some brutal climbs. It was the kind of trip that I imagine would have some of my more skilled friends whimpering for a bailout. And it kicked ass.

The best part, though, the best part by far, was the companions. A group of strangers, many of whom were still kind of new to mountain biking but looking for an "adventure," thrust by circumstance into close quarters. Everybody got scuffed up and bloody at some point. A few got knocked sideways with heat exhaustion (heavy drinking at night followed by hard riding each day can wear a body down some). But nobody complained. And everybody went home feeling like they'd just torn off a chunk of the world. And we all emerged with some new friends. It was one of those times that I will remember fondly on my deathbed.

This is a blatant plug. Dave Campbell is a good guy, running a tour operation by the seat of his pants. No handholding, no four-star valet service. He's got something very different going on down there, where you get thrown straight into the way of life in another country, eating and drinking with the locals and riding the backcountry in a place where almost nobody rides bikes for fun. It is anything but a "Napa Valley wine tour," and that's a very good thing. Check out his web site, www.mountainbikeadventures.com, just for the hell of it. If you want to push yourself, meet some interesting strangers and ride somewhere huge and beautiful where the air is clean, this rates right up there&--Mike Ferrentino

Mark Weir quote of the week: "Damn! Leg warmers are hot!"--Weir, stating what should be a pretty obvious reality, on trying to rationalize his complete implosion on lap two of the Sea Otter Cross Country race as having something to do with being overdressed.

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