Took my first ride on the north loop today. Still lots of swamps between Rathburn & Eglinton on both sides, will need to go in and cut more drainage. I hacked a couple quick & dirty cuts to get some drainage started but it’s going to need a lot more work.

The mini-loop around the small stream south of Matheson has a section that’s about to cave…[Read more]

Took a quick peek in the north loop earlier today, it’s pretty much a skating rink in there, if you don’t have studs you’ll have a very bad day.

Tubeless. Many tires will start bleeding sealant through the sidewalls once they’ve been scraped up a bit, in my experience Continental and Schwalbe tires are particularly prone to this. The only solution I’ve found is running tires with thicker heavier sidewalls & casings. I’m not saying run a DH tire, but at least something like a Maxxis EXO…[Read more]

Four years? FOUR YEARS??! You cannot be serious.
I have no words for this.

The good news is they got rid of Cairnes, tracks where racers can be competitive on an enduro bike have no business being on the DH schedule. Unfortunately Lourdes is also gone, and it was one of the best tracks in the past few yeas. In exchange we get La Bresse (mediocre) and Losinj, which sounds awfully close to “losing”. Losinj looks like…[Read more]

Trail is now fenced off on both sides & both directions at the Eglinton bridge. There are ways around but it’s a pain in the butt and requires some road sections. I’ve been hacking away at the bushes and the trail is reasonably clear from Rathburn to the pedestrian bridge south of Matheson, haven’t had a chance to clear out anything north of…[Read more]

East side of the south loop is pretty good except for the usual wet spots. Breathe with your nose unless you like the taste of hanging caterpillars, I was covered with at least a hundred of those darn things after my ride this evening.

Riding Blue on a Remedy is easier than Whistler on a DH bike. As long as you have good tires and decent brakes it’s a piece of cake.

I’ve come to the realization that modern bikes are disposable pieces of plastic suckiness, and returned to the goodness of Italian steel tubes and purple anodized chainring bolts.

I almost think the solution for Etobicoke Creek is to stop maintaining the trails and just let them get rutted & chewed up to the point where people stop riding them because it’s not fun anymore. And if the abusers want to keep riding the trail they can either deal with the mess or start fixing it themselves.

There are some bottom brackets that use angular contact bearings and Shimano hubs & pedals use them as well so it is possible to have a bike where it’s all angular contact. But for most bikes, yeah, the headset’s the only one that isn’t a cheap radial bearing.

IMO there’s only 2 things that really matter for bearings used in mountain bike parts:

1) Do the seals actually seal out contaminants?
2) Can the bearings handle heavy impact loads?

If the answer to either of the above is no, the bearing’s going to have an unacceptably short life.

Think about the big picture is what singlesproket and myself are saying. We have bunch of clubs in Ontario each doing their own thing in their own area and that’s about where it ends. There’s no representative body or structure for clubs to work together on common causes such as land access, development, securing grants, and so forth. The…[Read more]

They do all that, but mainly within the club & its members. Think this over for a while and you’ll see why this is problem, particularly in the long term big picture end of things.

Shimano has a bunch of patents on their Ice-tech rotors so it’s not surprising that no one else can copy them. Everything from the aluminum sandwich construction, extended heat sink fins, and even the way the friction disc is attached to the carrier is covered by patents. No one else will be legally making Ice-tech rotors for the next 10-15…[Read more]

Get the dropper. A 1X doesn’t do anything to change the way you ride, you lose the left shifter but so what? It’s a bit lighter but you’ll end up with a compromised gearing range and/or some wonky gaps between the gears. Wide range cassettes often have oddly spaced or overly large gaps between some of the gears and a cassette that has good,…[Read more]

North loop west side is giant sheet of ice, don’t even think about it unless you have studs. East side is mostly good with some icy patches.

Took a ride on the north loop today, the lower pedestrian path is nicely packed down all the way up to Matheson, easily doable on a regular bike. The singletrack is another story, the hikers have broken a trail in some places but it’s not packed down yet, you won’t get anywhere without a fat bike.

Rode part of the north loop earlier this evening, had to walk up all the climbs since there wasn’t much grip with the fresh snow. It’s probably going to be fat bike only by tomorrow with the way the snow was coming down during my ride.

Thanks for the update and especially for the contact info. I’m pretty out of the loop these days after getting completely burned out on advocacy in the early 2000s, now I know who I can contact to talk about things like this.

As for trail conditions, it’s ugly in there. I rode part of the north loop on Monday and spent far too much time hiking…[Read more]