Celebrating the start of summer

High today (at PAIN): 45 F
Low today (at PAIN): 36 F

Woohooo!!!!!!! No more school!!!!! I am officially done with required classes FOREVER. FOREVER! Did I mention FOREVER? Right after my 8am exam on Sat. (WHAT were they thinking?!!) a group of us headed down to Denali to do the first bike trip of the summer.

Photos above is Steffen's. Below is the crew, Steffen, Brando, Eyal, Patrik, Valerie and I.

Steffen attempts to jump over the mountain.

We went on a short ride Sat. night, then scouted out a camping spot down a cliff by the Teklanika river.

Not too shabby of a spot..

Eyal came blazing down the road playing harmonica. Harmonica and riding at the same time, pretty talented I must say!
Conditions degraded fairly rapidly as we headed up Sable Pass. Eh, summer, snowstorm, whatever. It doesn't phase me much anymore whether it snows in November or in June. :)
Ha ha, ok Eyal. You get the awesome award. I haven't ever seen anyone jump with their bike before. I don't think I could do it very successfully.

Above photo by Steffen

The trickiest part of riding in the snow (or rain for that matter) is when you pick up any speed, the pellets of precipitation act as bullets into your unprotected eyes and it's hard to see anything. Ski googles or sunglasses would have been useful, but go figure they were left in the car! Luckily, when this guy below appeared in front of us, we were NOT going downhill. Oy vey! This is Steffen's photo... and so is the one after. You can see all of his photos with narration on his Picasa photos.

And it's been awhile since I have wiped out, here is the damage I did by hitting a gravel patch (going uphill at a very slow pace, about to stop, and didn't clip out in time. Classic.) Hurts worse than it looks, and put me out of commission for a little bit..And on a completely different note, Alexis comes Thursday.. let the fun begin! :-D