Mountain Biking in Vermont Is Unlike Anywhere Else!

Oh, this is kind of cool. All right, so we are riding the Woodstock Trails, or it's actually known as Mount Pegg, but they're in Woodstock, Vermont. And we've been here before, but we don't ride here enough to remember everything, like the back of our hand. But I want to go check out these drops, like the perfect set of progression drops from small to less small. It'll stop your action to warm up. Perfect, all right. Anyway, done messing around with a little progression park. That's pretty cool. I like when places have things like that to, I don't know, even for experienced riders, it's fun to mess around on and dork around on. But for other people, it's a good place to warm up and get their skills going. So anyway, we're gonna pedal up to one of the tops. We got about probably like a 15-minute climb. And I don't know any of the trail names, but I do know that one of the guys who I used to be teammates with, Gavin Vaughn, has done a lot of trail building up here. And he's a really good downhiller. And he did some World Cups himself. So the quality of his building matches the quality of his riding. So I don't know how any of this looks on camera right now, but we're in peak foliage season right now. It's kind of been a little bit of a less vibrant fall than usual because of all the rain Vermont has gotten. A lot of maple leaves just didn't get that rich, vibrant color. It's still pretty, but not as saturated as it usually is. All right, so we're about halfway up the climb. Wanted to take a quick break to show you a really cool feature. See, there's like a bunch of lines right here. And then there's two trails. There's the trail that goes to the left. Then there's this trail, which caps over a berm. Got some rock sections. So to me, this is like, this is a prime example of a really good trail where a lot of different line options, a lot of fun features, and no punchy climbs in the middle of the trail. All right, 15 minutes later, we are at the top of the climb. All right, so I think this trail is what, called cloud drop? I think so. So let's go do a little bit of leaf surfing. It's always a little tricky to see where the trail goes in the fall because leaves obscure the trail sometimes. Found the edge of the trail right there. I love features like that. Just hips that can go as deep as you want. All right, right here is where we're coming into that feature. Little ducking action for the tree. Thank you for the flags there, that helped. I think one of my favorite things is going to a trail network that I've ridden before and noticing a new trail that I have not ridden. That makes me really excited because that means there's more stuff to discover. Okay, let's orient ourselves where we are. Blah, blah, blah, blah, cloud drop. So I want this map, this mountain bike map. That's the skiing map. You can tell because of the way it is. So we just did that blue trail all the way down, kind of met up with hard style a little bit, cut over, and then right about here, we actually jumped off Sir Berms a lot and took this green over and we passed hard style and now we're going up the red line and we're gonna go all the way to the top. The last time I rode these trails, I was on my GT Sensor, which I actually think is a better bike for these trails because these trails are a little bit smoother and not that rough. And this bike does pedal pretty well and it is fine on smooth trails, but I find my sensor to be a little bit more playful and on this kind of stuff, tend to like something a little bit more playful. That being said, this is a bike that was in the car and I was too lazy to take it out and it is a perfectly acceptable ride for today. So that's why I'm on it. All right, so this time, this time we're gonna do the trail called hard style, not hard line as I was saying earlier, hard style. All right, so I was gonna use trail forks to figure out where some of the trails start and yeah, apparently you have to pay for it now. A lot of trail networks are relying on trail forks these days and now this stuff is behind a paywall, which is, I mean, I understand it from a business perspective, but it's like very frustrating. So I guess we'll just have to fly blind. All right, with that rant out of the way, let's actually go ride bikes because that's for free and it's fun. That gap's hard to get right out of the gate. All right, Phil, what the heck was that? I went off trail and I also partially destroyed this turn. I'm gonna hike up and do that again because that was frustrating. Take two, there we go. This is definitely one of those shows where you probably want to hit it a few times to know the lines. Wow, that's awesome. I don't know where this goes. There's a few features right there I just missed. I remember hitting those up to the top when I was here with Gavin. Oh my God, Phil. I'm on the struggle bus. Yeah. This is like a really tight pump track-esque trail but really hard to read what's coming up when you don't do it very often, which I like. All right, here's that little berm gap. Oh, that flannel caught me off guard. Well, I don't know if that's new because I recognize this. I wonder if they just built a new end of the course for end of the trail style. Hard style. I was like, stop for a second. I was like, oh no, it comes back in, we're good. All right, so past few runs, we're going right here up to Cloud Drop. This time we're following red line and we're traversing down the ridge a little bit further to get to another set of few trails. Over here, the terrain is completely different. We haven't gone that much farther but there's a lot more rock, which definitely changes up the character of the trail. All right, so I'm pretty sure we want to be up somewhere over there, but the trail starts going down here. We're definitely on a section of trail that I do not recognize. Is there a trail that we're just not seeing? So we're gonna see when we go down. We've done this climb a different way. Wait, were we just climbing up this or is this different? It's different. Are you sure? We were climbing up over there. Oh yeah, it's right there. Jeez, everything looks the same. I hate descending without gloves. Wasn't expecting to go downhill. Regardless, this is pretty cool. Holy off-camber, derailer monster. All right, so question is, do you want to go that way or do you want to go this way? I say we go this way and figure out where we are. Missed something. I think I've done this before. This vaguely looks familiar. I think the trail that we're looking for will end up crossing this somewhere. More confusion. Okay, there's a map right here. Let's take a picture of this. All right, so here's the thing. It says to scan for the QR code. Okay, problem is we probably don't have enough service. Map. Oh look, it's behind a paywall. So what we do is we take a picture of the map. We've ridden here before without a trail map and have had no issues navigating this place. But today we apparently made a wrong turn somewhere and are having a little hard time figuring out where we are. Part of the fun of mountain biking is getting lost and trying to figure out where you are. But sometimes when you just want to ride, it's also a little frustrating. But I think we're fine. Oh, we found another kiosk with another map. Pegway, there we go. So now that we're finally on a trail we actually recognize, we should be able to get to the top. Okay, if this leaf could buzz off, like actually buzz off. This climb just keeps going and going. You think you're at the top, but wait, there's more. I think, I actually think the top is like right up here, but who knows? There might be another surprise little punch I forgot about. Yeah, we made it. All right, 1,700 feet of climbing. You started early. Yeah, I started mine late, so 2,000 feet of climbing. These are probably the best food to eat. Not for you, but they taste amazing. All right, with that quick snack break out of the way, it's time to go do some descending. But wait, there's more climbing. Not for long though. So these gloves have like the silicone on the pointer finger which I actually really don't like because as a sweaty person, once that silicone gets remotely wet, it slips on your brake lever. I think this is one of the first trails we did over on this side when we first came here. I'm not sure if we've done it since, to be honest. All right, sneaky little route almost got me. A little bit tricky to see where the trail was going. All right, sure know where to go. Steep and hard to see where the trail is going. Think I'm ad-libbing a little bit. Straight. I think there's more than one line. Oh, okay, yeah. Because I was thinking the same thing. I was going down there, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I'm just ad-libbing right now. Oh, look whose front wheel is completely loose. That was definitely loose. There you go, that's better. This right here is probably my favorite multi-tool. The only thing it's missing is honestly an eight mil, but I like it because I can just put it in my pocket and it sits nice and flush. It doesn't bulge out. I'll leave a link to this one in the description below in case you want to pick it up. I think we have one last pedal up. We'll kind of do hard line or cloud drop again, and then we'll be back at the car. So let's go do that. Fall time makes actually making videos a little bit easier because more light gets through the trees and the sensors on GoPros aren't that big. So they need a lot of light for the image quality to look good. So that's why videos in the winter always look so good because there's an abundance of light. Sometimes when you're in the dark woods, footage just looks awful. So by that logic, this video should look pretty good today. High five. We made it. We did. All right, how many feet of climbing did we do? 2,500. 2,500, that's a decent day. It's the most we've done in a while. All right, so back down hard style and then let's go. Kind of got it. Little bit of a case. This trail's so zippy. Kind of got that time, but still really tricky. Come on, sleeve. Can't ride with my sleeve like that. Feels too awkward. This time we'll go this way. I'm hoping that there is another descent over here. Okay. Obviously I'm wrong. Either way, somewhere around here, there's another exit to this trail. Maybe it's up here. Ah, here it is. Oh, that's good. That's a good ending. Go team. Oh, he started in front of me. Well. Oh, that felt good. That was a good ride. Yeah, we made it. So, if you haven't seen my last video where I was doing a downhill race at Powder Ridge, I'll leave that right up here. Go watch that out, because that's a really good video. I think the thumbnail kind of undersold it. So anyways, my name is Tom Metz. Thanks for playing bikes with me today. And I will see you guys next time. Let's go do this again.