The Megavalanche has always been on my to-do list and finally this year I got round to doing it. Even the tall tales from people who had ridden it couldn’t do justice to the scale and craziness of the event. Even the start above the snow was bordering on unrideable, let alone with 500 riders breathing down my neck, it was just a case of getting out of there as fast as possible and trying to leave the carnage behind.

Mega Avalanche start

The action started with the qualifying rounds on Friday, with 9 rounds of 200 riders each. The tight gravel hairpins straight out of the gate were the first potential for carnage, remember there are 25 riders per row all going to single file within the first 10 seconds of the race, but I left everyone else to pile up on the popular inside lines, scooting round the slower but safer outsides instead. 25 minutes later and barely able to grip the bars I finished 8th in my round, good enough for a 3rd row in the main event.

popping out at the end of the qualifier

Normally the race starts on snow. Well it did this year too I suppose, but the patch of snow was only just big enough to line everyone up on before it turned to piles of shattered rock which we were to ride along at a 30-degree camber. This was a recipe for disaster and I picked a safe route, it wasn’t fast but I got out of most of the trouble pretty quick. Not everyone was so lucky and as you can see from the picture below it quickly turned into a scene from Dante’s Inferno or perhaps an Orc battle in the Lord of the Rings.

Megavalanche start turns into a battleground

After the rocks the course went back onto the more traditional glacier, followed by the most amazing high Alpine singletrack you could ever imagine. Actually most of the course was singletrack this year, great for riding but not so great for passing and after I binned it up on the snow there was nothing for it but to be patient and wait for safe passing places. Still I got to the bottom in one piece, in 71st place which is OK for a first attempt. I guess I’ll be back for more one day with a load of lessons learned.

Riders spread out across the glacier

JRA Post Bike - Surly Big Dummy

After last years experimentation with the post-trailer we found it wasn’t so easy to use we’ve upgraded to a post bike, the Surly Big Dummy with Xtracycle freeloaders.

We stayed near the Xtracycle people at Interbike a couple of years ago and we always jealous as they loaded up and rode round the carpark with ridiculous things on board.

After a while we went for it and got in the que for the full Surly frame option. Its been in operation for a while now,  its much easier to ride and we can get more post on for buzzing round to the post office.

Just don’t ask ‘whats that?’ if you come in as we’ll unhelpfully say it’s  a bike.

A combination of awesome downhill skills, raw power and some NoTubes rims saw our team rider Dan winning the Ae Forest Avalanche Enduro last weekend. A full report will be up soon, but for now just enjoy the Euro music from the prize presentation…

the JRA hamster expired

Regular visitors to the site might have spotted more than just a few glitches over the last week, in fact the whole lot disappeared for a couple of days. Something drastic broke on our server and as luck would have it, it co-incided with our website hosting company going bust.

We’d had inklings that all might not be well the the hosting company (Burton Hosting) as service levels gradually deteriorated from instantaneous response  to not answering phone calls, emails or support tickets over the course of a year, and luckily we had sorted out a new host and taken backups. It still caused a load of trouble but I think we’re back to normal now. If anyone reading this knows what actually happened to Burton Hosting I’d be interested to hear about it.

In other unrelated website destruction news, Singletrackworld.com were hacked by some unscrupulous 6th form students who then posted their entire user database on a hacking website. This is a bit of an unpleasant thing to happen at the best of times but they could have probably done without working hard all through Christmas so we wish them all the best getting it back up and running again.

EDIT: It seems Singletrack were on Burton Hosting too so it’s not entirely unrelated that both our sites went down for longer than they should have done.

And here’s a link about them: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=742458

XC Racer calendar

We’ve very kindly been sent from either Luke or Martyn, (no names were attached) a copy of their limited edition XC Racer calender. It’s big and glossy and quite impressive although I know some of the photos have come out darker than they hoped. I’m not sure why we’ve got one but it will go on the office wall next year, so thanks.

ok it reads 1.47 'cos I was slow finding the picture.

We never thought it would seem like we’re running a financial website but at the moment it feels like we do more sums than bike stuff.

We have reduced VAT to 15% this will reduce a £100 item to £97.90.

The pound is still falling against the dollar currently $1.45 to the pound, and our prices may rise with the next shipments of both NoTubes and Industry 9 up to another possible 17.2% (the exchange rate change since we last calculated prices) so your £97.90 becomes £114.74.

Suppliers are also raising prices and Maxxis stock will be put up in price next week with DH tyres going up the most by up to £8 and XC tyres less so. We regret we can not do anything to hold prices if the pound keeps falling.

The bottom line is don’t delay your purchases.

15.12.08 UPDATE: New Maxxis stock is in so the prices of all tyres are due to go up this week … when we get round to it…

We’ve moved the shop onto the .com domain (it used to be on the .co.uk one) and shifted this news area onto www.justridingalong.com/news/.

It might not all work properly so if you find a problem, please let me know… jon@justridingalong.com

thanks

Checking I had spelled drivel right I found Google.co.uk has pointed ‘drivel’ to the Guardian Horoscopes, I searched the page and the cached for a genuine mention of the word drivel but seems they might have got it right. I’m on the look out for “zany characters you would normally give a wide berth.”

More boringly it may have mentioned the previous “Drink Drivel” article but it looks too good to be a coincidence.

Back to the subject, if you have any words you would like to publish on the world wide web to be ignored with everyone else’s in the torrent of blogs do send them over. We’re slowly trying to drag Just Riding Along back to the realms of a topical website.