...before a 10km warm up through Karapoti Gorge.

After a good first ride on Wednesday, I snuck out on Saturday morning to go back up and down Salvation again. It was fun and went very well. I tried to go down the track without putting my foot down at all, but had to twice - once being an almost unrideable hairpin bend at the bottom. Oh, and when I stopped to let the nice lady with the dog past, but that doesn't count.

Then Sunday I left home 7:30am and met R, Scott, Brains and Gordie at Karori Fire Station. We went up a track behind Karori Park called Wahine. Very different riding than Salvation, which is very narrow through the bush with good footing under the wheels. Wahine starts as more your classic kiwi pine-trees-growing-on-steep-hillside. Slippery but wide. Interesting. I walked the hard bits, but so did the others so I guess that's okay.

After that we followed farm tracks along the ridgeline heading from Makara towards Mt Kaukau. Good fun, chatting and riding, with lots of ups and downs. The farm gates that we carefully closed behind us all seemed to be at the bottom of a long downhill, designed to ruin momentum before the next big uphill.

Gordie and Brains sprint the end of some uphills, racing each other. After a couple of hours Brains won spectacularly their longest sprint - but then stopped with a broken spoke. R is a bike mechanic wizard, but even the wiz can't fix this. Much chatter about Brains' crappy old bike (I tried it - the front suspension is shot and that makes it very hard to ride over rugged downhills) and the new bike he has ordered and paid for but which is not due for 6 weeks. So Brains departed downhill, dropping off the ridgeline down a track to Churton Park, and we spun around to loop back toward Makara.

Back is steeper, and the pack walks the steep bits. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed by the amount of walking we do. We followed some single-track, with occasional steep dropoffs covered in bracken to our right. At one point a rapid downhill corner goes over an edge - and then has a hidden cut right with a bracken slope for any who fail to make the turn. Gordie and I both barely brake in time to make the turn. I remember that Jono rode this track last week, and said he encountered something like this - but at very high speed, and he's got the grazes to prove it. Heh.

We finish with a set of downhill bits back down to/through Wahine (I don't know where it starts and ends). I manage what seem to me some quite insanely steep bits of track, though I fall at the end of my best piece of riding just as Gordie is congratulating me on it.

Three hours riding on hills, much of it rutted farm tracks, some steep uphill/downhill on single-track. Home by 10:30am in time to help prepare lunch for my inlaws.