People say that timing is everything and I guess that I am one of them who says that.  I normally ride Galbraith in the early morning.  I try for going up pre-dawn that way as the sun is coming up I am riding down, what are for the most part, empty trails.  Occasionally I get a late start and start seeing other rider, maybe 6 or 8 on the lower trails on my way out.

Yesterday, in an effort to ramp up conditioning, I ventured on to the hill after work, and on a Friday, and on a holiday weekend.  OMG, it was an ant hill.  First, parking lot and road maxed out with lawn chair gatherings also clogging the parking lot.  Also so many people either going up or down that I don’t think there was a time in my couple of hours on the ant hill that I didn’t have at least one other human in sight, most of the time more.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I signed up for the Mount Baker Hill Climb, but I did and I will be doing it next weekend.  Push, Pull and Drag if I must, but I will do it.  So that is what got me on the ant hill called Galbraith.  I needed to spend some time pedaling uphill and if you’ve been up the Tower Road then you are well aware that it is uphill.  So ants be damned, I pedaled up the road to the tower, came back down, turned around and did it again.  As long as I stayed on the road I felt I was mostly safe from collision, but I stayed off the trails because as many times as I have been up and down Galbraith over the years, I have no experience in traffic.

Relive ‘Afternoon Aug 31st’