Angelfire NM, Crested Butte/Winterpark CO, and Lubbock TX djs

the Austin crew: Derek, Abel and Vernon ready for some flow trails

With a 60% chance of rain all week, I wasn't optomistic. But we barely saw any rain and the clouds kept the temps down in the 60-70s . 

The Rio Grande at Gorge bridge is a mini Grand Canyon in NM. The "Earthships" in Colorado look like weird amorphous mosques made of concrete and garbage. They're apparently a neighborhood of semi subterranean houses that use bottles, cans and tires as insulation.

I started the riding trip at Walnut Creek in Austin. I put the AM bike though its paces and took some time to find some artifacts in the creek (Walnut has some cool stuff to see).  The next day me and the Austin crew made the seven hour trek to the Lubbock BMX trails for an afternoon. Bret Parker and Chris Kavanaugh (Indust riders) did an amazing job on some trails that only have a few locals. From there we headed to Angelfire NM where a former Austin local-turned resort employee (named Luke) showed us the way to ride the flow trails. Very fast and scary for a warm up. The next day we drove to Frisco bike park in Colorado: a huge, well kept park with lots to do. We hit the bigger lines (for suspension bikes) and took off for Crested Butte. The Evolution bike park in CB had smoother flow trails and had a technical/boulder trail that sent me on my helmet. The ladder obstacles (like the vertical cork screw thing) were outstanding. The Trestle park in Winterpark was the last stop and it was the most flowy. I did find that, without a leader, it was easy to overshoot a jump or hit a tree. I'll see if one of the guys got a decent video of either (I put a shoulder into a tree on "No Quarter")  . My bike barely made it through the last day. I had bent a main shock bolt and blown out my Fox DHX after overshooting a ~35ft foot jump.