Hood River

Hood River is definitely one of my favourite towns in the world. There is so much going on there for such a small town, and most notably, so many people there are super friendly, down to earth, and stoked on the outdoors. The Dakine guys had lined us up to stay at Pat from Dakine’s BandB and our friend Dax’s place. Dax is one of the Product Designers at Dakine – he’s responsible for a lot of the packs and is doing an insane job with their product.

He’s also a sick rider, and before we knew it on Saturday, we were loading the bikes up and heading out for an epic shuttle. Shane from Discovery (local shop) made the generous gesture of throwing all of us and our bikes into his van and took us to the top of their main area, called Post Canyon. I won’t get into all the details of our ride, but it was a fun afternoon – the riders there rip, the builders are always working and improving their trails, and the community that ride there both from Hood and Portland in a lot of ways generally have their act together. It was a pleasure to ride those trails with those guys.

The show on Saturday night in Hood was cool – it was a good turnout and the crowd response from a lot of different parts of the film was enthusiastic. The general stoke level seemed high, and we were enjoying ourselves thoroughly. We hit some latenight food and drinks at a chill little spot called Brian’s and then called it a night. On Sunday, we rode again – a similar shuttle but near the bottom we went to another part of the mountain to ride some fast singletrack. The conditions were perfect – the winter moisture had dried up, but not so much that things were getting too dusty or loose. The spring is such a good time to ride.