In case it was NOT immediately obvious from the previous post, we had 5 participants today - BeachGrad05, Erwin8r, PhotoJoe, HuffinandPuffin and me. We all rode to the shack (great job Erwin!) and then Beachgrad and Erwin decided to head down to the parking lot because of prior commitments.

HP, PJ and I headed up to the village, got some water and decided we should try to make it up to the vaunted ski lifts (the Tour of California finished at the ski lifts 2 years ago - if a bunch of skinny pros can do it, surely we can as well?) So after 25 miles and about 3400 feet of climbing, what's another 5 miles and 2,200 feet? Some obviously gifted cycling ladies in the village were talking up the road and giving us tips (you can recover a little bit in the switch backs. no really , the grade drops from 15% to 13% for about 7 feet. What a recovery!) I actually walked the last 200 feet and Huffin rode the whole thing on his quad equipped Cannondale.

Cruise back down to the village for lunch and while we were wrapping up, some asian gent stopped by our table and asked if we could help him with his tire - he had a leak, apparently, and was concerned he'd run out of CO2. I don't think any of us are quite clear on what the issue was but we helped him get his tire reinstalled & inflated and then left - we offered to ride back down to the start with him and he took us up on it in case he had further issues. That's our good cycling karma deed for the week.

My wife and kids started panicking about 4 pm that I hadn't contacted them and actually started driving up to Glendora to find me and scrape me off the road. No cell coverage up there to speak of, so when I called them from the bottom of the hill they were pretty freaked out - in case any of you are wondering that's why I bolted and didn't stick around. Le Sigh.