Cold this morning - the kind of day where you have to dress so you won't be too warm on the way up or too cold on the way down but never seem to get it right.
I got to the gate at 8:02 and I wasn't feeling fast and since JB wasn't there yet I figured I'd get a head start, so I searched around a bit for a rock to put on the post and then I took off.
Since the Challenge was last Sunday the bike rider density on the Mountain has plummetted. I saw not a single rider going up, and I saw only five coming down during my ascent.
Roadkill Sighting: Quite a few small, young snakes; belly up and slitherless. Thing about snakes on the road is, you can't really make an evaluation of their risk level until you get pretty close, so I gave these babies a wide berth.
So sure enough, my time to Junction sucked and by now I figured JB must have overslept or something. I said "hi" to a guy who came up SGR on a Landshark with a cool paint job and then suddenly JB appears. Turns out my FlightDeck clock was just a little fast and his watch was just a little slow (we verified this by calling "POP-CORN" on my cell phone) and we had just missed each other at the Gate: he got there a few minutes early, rode up to the Loading Dock and turned around, and he was on the other side of the Shack when I started up. I didn't see him at all; he saw me but somehow thought I must have been somebody else so he waited around for another ten minutes!
They have the Challenge results posted at the Ranger Station display case already; we both were wowed by the age of the winner, Rob Anderson - 51 years. Rob lives in Marin and has quite a respectable palmares: LINK. I also noticed that John Slawta (builder of Landshark bicycles) came down from Oregon and did the ride in well under an hour.
Sure enough, I was just a little too cold on the way back down. Nice to see a few people coming up though.
