Story for Happy Ninja New Year / Spesh Sesh #2

New Year's Day marked the opening of Flat Rock Ranch in Comfort, TX. Flat Rock Ranch has been regarded as the #1 Mountain Biking destination in Texas for years now, thanks to the beautifully constructed and maintained singletrack, and the gorgeous Hill Country terrain. 

On New Years, I rode the Lower Loop with my friends in the Texas Trail Ninjas. The Ninjas are a group of friends and riders connected through group rides, mockery, and Facebook posts whose motto is to tread the trails lighly, leaving no trace (like ninjas)...and their riding style is fast, furious, and wrings every iota of fun out of any given section of trail. I love riding with this group, and have learned a tremendous amount of skills since joining them. 

The Lower Loop at Flat Rock Ranch is roughly 15.5 miles of winding singletrack with a technical features intermixed with fast flowy trail. At least, if you have legs made of steel and lungs that work like bellows then it's fast and flowy. If you are, like me, less conditioned than you wish you were, the 1,000 feet or so of climbing over those 15+ miles are going to pretty much reduce you to a quaking tub of goo. Which is exactly what my legs felt like after the ride. 
Along the way though, I got to ride some amazing trail, including some truly epic climbs. The biggest, Pipeline Hill, is almost 2 miles of continuous climbing, including some pretty reasonable traverses and some brutal switchbacks with steep technical climbs. The vistas though, were incredible.


Pipeline is almost exactly the halfway point. It's also the highest point on the Lower Loop. We took a nice long rest while we were up there, which I for one desperately needed. It was about this point in the ride I started having serious questions about whether I could complete the loop. The long, sustained climbs are killer on the heart rate and I was hurtin badly. Still a rest, some water, and a few bites of food and I felt well enough to continue. 
That was a good decision as it would turn out, because the payoff for all that pain climbing was over three miles of downhill, sometimes really steep and sketchy like Evil Worm, which is full of ledges, drops, and slippery switchbacks, and sometimes a little more gradual and relaxed, even requiring a little pedaling to keep up the pace. Of course after that nice rest, it's back to climbing again. In fact, the second big climb is the most brutal one in my opinion. You're already tired, and your heart rate is still up from the downhill and you launch into 1.7 miles of climbing. 240 feet of climbing overall, at grades from 5-10% and in spots highly technical. The views continue to be gorgeous of course. This is halfway up for an example.

Finally, you get to the last downhill, a winding and smooth singletrack punctuated with a few steep technical sections that you'd better have decent descending skills to handle. At the bottom you get to the final launch, a nice 2.5-3 foot drop and an easy pedal back to the parking lot.