It looked like the Toonie good weather karma had been well and truly broken last Thursday (June 25). This was going to be the Whistler Bikes Guides Toonie race and we were meeting at the Wedgemount parking lot. Not only had it been raining on and off all day, with more to fall on the way, but rain over the previous days had woken up swarms of hungry mosquitoes as well, making for an interesting tableau at sign-up.

Sorry, guys, but I have zero tolerance for the buggers and, having forgotten the Deet, there was only one thing for it: Keep on moving! Luckily, the organizers of this race had given us lots of opportunity to do just that by laying out a seriously challenging course that took in part of Comfortably Numb.

To me, Numb starts at the Al Gray Bridge, with the bit before that still known as Secret North. However, there is another trail that you get to by turning right onto the Wedge Creek FSR and then hanging several left turns. I can’t find this trail even in my trusty copy of Whistler Mountain Biking, but I know we’ve been on this trail before and it does meet up with Secret North somewhere in the middle, I would guess. A job for our intrepid local trail map makes perhaps?

After a tough grind up Secret North, the trail does have some serious descents, including some vicious-looking wooden bridges that, with the rain and the mud, had turned fairly treacherous. It was on the last wooden descent bridge that one of the night’s more spectacular crashes happened, when Lydia Hamel lost her grip on the wood, causing the bike to basically go where it wanted. In this case that turned out to be over the edge. The bike, sans Lydia, tumbled down and flew on in front of a rider who had turned down the trail further on and had the amazing experience of being faced by rider-less bike airing over the trail. Luckily two gentlemen, Chris and Jorge, were on hand to help in the recovery of the bike and Lydia was able to finish the race none the worse for wear.

After riding Comfortably Numb for a while, we turned off on one of the, apparently, several cut-offs that will take you down to the Green Lake Loop, where we continued our race all the way to Lost Lake Park. Just to give you an idea of the length of this race, for the women Linda Cowan brought in a time of one hour, 23 minutes, 25 seconds, while Marilyn Manso took only 1:17:21 to do it and Fanny Paquette won this category with a time of 1:11:24. Tyler Allison did the thing in 54:30, winning for the juniors, with Mike Boehm and Dave Burch just beating him respectively with times of 54:24 and 53:40. Flying Matt Ryan won the race doing it all in 53:20.

Because of the rain and the distance to the start involved, “only” about 180 riders showed up to do this race but everyone had a good if somewhat soggy and not overly warm time of it at the après at the Riverside Café. Thanks go to all the sponsors, Riverside Café, Quinny’s Café, Nesters, Whistler Brewing and Whistler Chocolates.

This week’s (July 2) race will be the Chromag rumble in the Interpretive Forrest. See you at the bridge to Cheakamus Crossing.

Next week (July 9) will be the Slope Side and Samurai Sushi classic on the West Side trails. We’ll see you at the top of Cardiac Hill on Alta Lake Road.