I just got home from a one week trip to Vancouver Island and my hometown of Victoria where I was riding every day and visiting my friends and family.  It was great to escape the wintry conditions of Squamish as I finally got a solid chance to test the new DH prototype that we are working on here at Marin.

The trails on Vancouver Island are some of my favorites.  It reminds me of flying through lush green forests on a George Lucas designed speeder bike.  The trails were mint over there and I finally had the chance to get the new Marin up to speed.

I was riding with my friends Dom Menard and Andrew Mitchell, the current Canadian DH champ. Both are solid guys to ride with and Drew especially is a ripper who is always pushing the limits. It was good to get up to speed after a winter on my snowboard and to start pushing it on the bike again.  We had a solid couple of test sessions where we rode Drew’s secret DH training trail in Victoria and worked on huge drifting corners and Mt. Prevost in Duncan, BC.  Mt. Prevost is absolutely amazing, I do not recall the link right now, but I know that there is a sweet cable cam video of Prevost on You-Tube if you want to search around for it.

The trails at Prevost are crazy flowy, really fast and 15 minutes from top to bottom if you go flat out without stopping.  It was a very good test of the new bike and I was super impressed with how it is working.  I wish I could publish a photo of the bike, but it is still in the early phases of development.  I am sure that we will be posting shots of the bike here in the coming months as we get closer to the final production version.  I can say that it has about 8.75” of travel and is pretty close in design to the current Quake bikes.

Vancouver Island was fantastic and after 7 solid days of riding it is time to get back to Squamish and the office and put the finishing touches on our 2007 camp programs.

I hope your winter is going well and that you are getting out onto your trails as much as possible.

Cheers,

Mike