Burner Pics, as Promised

Okay, so I promised pics from the burner, and I have a few. These are a small selection of the photos taken by our friend Long, who was at the race taking amazing pics like a fiend.
You can see all the pics by following the following link

http://picasaweb.google.com/bikeworksABQ/BurnerPics#

I asked Long for his info, as he has a website started and such, since he is an aspiring photographer and I wanted to give him a plug since I think he takes some awesome pics. So he kindly wrote down all the pertinent info, which I left at work, possibly never to be seen again. But I'll get his info up here eventually, because it's not easy to take good action shots of biking, and he does it very well.

I'm also experimenting with posting whole lots of pics on the picasa web albums, which seems to be something Google has thrown together recently. It seems to be smooth and easy to put tons of pics up there, so hopefully I'll be sharing more in the near future.

Buenobye

Robble Robble Robble

Okay, first, reminder that we are closed tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday so that we can attend Interbike, the big ol' bike trade show in Vegas, and by all means have no fun whatsoever.

We will be back at it, bright eyed and bushy tailed on Friday at the crack of 10am.

Thank you for your patience with our weird hours, and rest assured, we'll miss you just as much as you will miss us. But don't worry, it's just 48 hours, and it'll go by real fast, we promise.

Secondly, I've been delinquent in my lack of talking about a cool new site, nmfreeride.com
It is a labor of love recently started by a friend and customer of our, David. He's got some great ideas and plans for the site, such as for sale sections, and tech sections, and the forums are already up and running. I think it will be a great place for the loose knit group of the regions freeriders and downhillers, who all seem to be acquaintances, to be able to communicate and help develop the local scene.
I think the forums can also be a good place for things like "hey, who's down to shuttle Sandia next Sunday," which currently seems to be organized by everybody calling Tonys cell and then he connects the dots.
So, check out the site and sign up.

Okay thats all. I should be getting off to bed since they guys are picking me up at the airport at 5:45 tomorrow morning.
Do you think Southwest serves booze at 7am?

Bikeworks Wins Team Category @ The Burner

So Tony, Vince and Scott won the team category of the Burner Saturday, completing 29 laps in 12 hours.
They beat the BTI team, who got 2nd in team, by a whole lap.
Our friend Chris Boice took second, getting beat by a mere 31 seconds by privateer Waylon Smith. Boice reportedly had the lead for the first 28 or so laps, but lost time once the sun went down. I bet next year he'll show up with some serious lighting strapped to his helmet and bike.

I'm impressed that after 12 hours things were that close. I know that's how the 24 hour cross country races often turn out as well, but in a DH race, I just didn't expect guys to be able to keep it that together for so many runs. I can't imagine what their arms and hands felt like that night.

Danny kept things together for our racers out there, which clearly made all the difference between the guys finishing first and last.

I haven't been given any photos of our own from the race yet, but our friend Long was there, and I hear he was taking photos like a fiend, so I'll post them when I get them.
In the mean time, I have a few links:

official results

a small selection of photos

forum link for ridemonkey.com

Good job guys.

Shop News

Reminder, the Red Bull Burner is this Saturday, from 9am to 9pm. Danny and Tony will be there, Tony racing on a team with Vince and Scott, and Danny most likely will be frantically repairing bikes in between runs.

Info on the Red Bull Burner

Then next week, Wednesday the 24th and Thursday the 25th, to be exact, the shop will be closed. All four of us are headed to Vegas to attend Interbike, the annual huge bike convention that inexplicably takes place in Vegas, quite possibly the least bike friendly city any of us have ever been to.
We will be there to check out what new stuff our brands are coming out with, what new stuff other brands are coming out with, and to generally get all dorky about bikes for a couple of days. Tony will undoubtedly return with an entire bag full of free shirts, hats, bike parts, etc, as he is undoubtedly the kind of schwag. I intend to follow him around the entire time and try to figure out how he does what he does, because Tony doing his thing at Interbike is the epitome of Tony doing what he does, and he does it well.

Okay, now I fix bikes.

More Trip Pics

Day two had us starting out at Avoriaz, an interesting little pre-planned ski community nestled up above Morzine against some cliffs. We drove the van up there to avoid having to climb the road for hours on our bikes. It was an overcast day from the start, with expected large amounts of rain in the afternoon. Even overcast, the views were impressive.



There happened to be a waterfall, which was awesome looking.



We rode up a trail, and at the top there were...amazing views!
On the left side of this picture, you can see the village of Avoriaz tucked up against the hill. I guess it was designed to blend in, and it really is not very noticable from Morzine.






There was some sweet singletrack to be found.

In the afternoon it started raining, but we still went out for two more trips up the gondola from Morzine. One time down we did an exploratory cross country ride that included a couple of long climbs, and some very wet and very slippery descents.
Second time down we rode the Pleney Downhill Course. I don't know what the history of this course is, if its ever been raced in a world cup or anything, but it sure was fun. It was a fully marked DH course with padded trees around every turn. It wasn't particularly technical, or steep, or difficult, just really swoopy and turney and fun. Didn't take any pictures of it, but there are tons of videos on you tube if youre interested:
Pleney DH You Tube

After that we had some lunch, and it started raining harder. Then it continued to rain, then rain, and then a little more rain, basically until bed time. Our afternoon looked like this:

The rainy afternoon was a bit of a bummer, but the next day completely made up for it.
We'll get to that soon.