Downieville
I’ve been thinking about posting an update from Downieville all weekend. Thinking but not doing. For those of you not familiar, Downieville is a tiny town at the confluence of a couple rivers in California’s Sierra. It’s very remote, and hasn’t really changed a lot in the last 5 decades. I’ve been coming up here since ’59, when my grandfather got a cabin on the Yuba river downstream from Downieville. I guess that makes this my 50th summer in Downieville! Yes, I’m old.
Recently Downieville has become quite the mountain bike mecca, and the big event of the year here is the Downieville Classic, home of the legendary Downieville downhill. Earlier this year we raised about $20,000 for the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship, the group that is responsible for much of the trail building and maintenance up here.
There are just too many fun things to do here, makes posting an update lower on the priority list. As usual, there is lots of good people watching. Here’s Joe Parkin ‘rocking’ the Softride.
RACE REPORT
800 people did the XC race yesterday, and Adam Craig shattered the course record by a couple minutes. Last year’s winner Ross Schnell is coming off a broken pelvis (or hip or some other significant body part-can’t remember), and finished down the field a bit. Mark Weir isn’t racing, he just became the father of little Gus, who is about 18 days old so Mark is sitting this one out.
RIVER JUMP
I have to say that the biggest fun I have here every year is watching the river jump. For the last 4 years (I think) it’s been won by Downieville local Tyler Marshall, and his trademark massive air. I got to be a judge again this year, along with Thomas Frischknecht, Myles Rockwell, HB, Willow Koerber and Ross Schnell. It was big fun. I wish I had some photos, but I didn’t want to risk having my camera land in the drink. It was a tough competition that started with 9 competitors and came down to a tie between Andrew Taylor (apparently from Santa Rosa) and Olivier Guincetre (Ogee) who is actually the newest employee at Ibis (I recused myself from voting of course). Ogee and Andrew both nailed their last couple of jumps and in the end we let the crowd decide. They handed it to Andrew.
The Ibis crew is lucky enough to have rented the big house right above the store on the main drag in town. We have a huge veranda where we’ve been having dinner every night, watching the world go by. Later on we had a nice double rainbow, check out the view from our deck:
Sorry about the video quality, I just got one of those new iPhone 3GS thingies, and this is more or less the first video I tried to post.
Here are a couple more. First, our event organizer Wayno..
The event closes down the main street, here’s a short video of the action, ending up with a nice shot of our free lunch, provided by Chris King. No, thumbnail, so all we have is a link.
downieville-midway1
Here’s the scene on the ‘midway’ starting at the Chris King booth where they are serving up pancakes in the morning and fajitas in the afternoon.
Ok, that’s the end of my lame experimentation with video.