The eleventh-annual California Mountain Unicycle Weekend was a success this past weekend with lots of great rides and activities, and no major injuries! This weekend will be remembered as the one with the most last-minute changes to schedules and locations, creating some confusion and additional driving but fortunately only for relatively few people. Due to the Bassetts fire up near Downieville (blocking roads leading to the ride area), we changed the schedule as of Thursday! I’m only aware of two cars that headed up there and got turned around at roadblocks. I’ll know in future to specify cell phone #s on the registration forms.
So Friday’s ride was changed to the Tahoe Rim Trail, the ride we originally had planned for Sunday. There were over 50 people on the ride, in sunny but cold and windy conditions. We had great fun, and several people got stunning pictures of themselves posing on rocks with Lake Tahoe or other big views in the background. Many people learned that day that Miles Ornish (Mornish) is a unicycling fly who can stick to walls! He’s good.
Saturday we had another very large group on the first section of the Hole In The Ground trail, right at the Donner summit. From there we rode a couple of miles, uphill all the way, to a beautiful overlook spot at one of the trail’s high points. I now know that Castle Peak has its name because it looks like a big castle (duh)!. All but two of the riders then zoomed back down the way they came up. Kris Holm and Beau Hoover decided to tackle the whole 12-mile trail, which contains lots of climbing up and down around the 7-8000’ range.
Saturday afternoon we were invited to do our Trials competition at Donner Ski Ranch a few miles away. A big team of volunteers built a Trials course from scratch in about an hour! This was natural Trials, in a rocky area a little south of the Ski lodge. Spectacular scenery and sunshine for the competition! I’ll post the results in the next post to keep things neat. In short, the big winner was one of the guys that had ridden 12 miles that morning…
After the Trials competition we returned to the lodge area, where a benefit was being held for local athlete Kyler Smith, who was paralyzed in a snowboarding accident over the winter. In exchange for using the Donner Ski Ranch facilities (and insurance), we helped out with the fundraising. Unicycle.com donated a brand new KH 24" Freeride unicycle, which we raffled off at $5 a ticket (5 for $20). Lots of tickets were bought by the unicyclists, as well as other people at the benefit. We raised $960, and 100% of that went to Kyler. Who won the unicycle? I can’t remember! Help please.
We also did a mini-public show. Due to the lack of pavement in front of the speakers and audience area, we just had Drew Brown from Austin, TX with his juggling canes. I’ve never seen anything like it, and he had it very well choreographed to music. Very cool! For the reasons above, we were not able to fit in a Street Freestyle competition.
Saturday evening we served up a community BBQ dinner in Truckee River Regional Park in town. The food came out great, we had a little folk band (local riders & friends) playing some music, and we gave out the prizes and “schwag” (stuff from our sponsors). Thanks to Unicycle.com, Bedford Unicycle, Kris Holm, Hudson Moore (Pedal Protectors), Rod Wylie, Nathan Hoover, Jess Riegel, Rolf Thompson and many others for donating prizes to the table.
For Sunday’s ride we still had our eyes on Downieville, but there were still road closures in the area, and the possibility of wind changes sending ash and/or bad air over the trail. So we instead went to a similar ride we call Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in South Lake Tahoe. This turned out to be about a 10.5 mile ride with around 1500’ of climbing and lots and lots of gnarly technical downhill. There were more than 35 people at our single “everybody” group stop, but I never got a complete count because some left before we did our group photo. In any case, more than double the previous record for that trail.
I hope everyone made it safely home and had a great time. See you all next year in Santa Cruz, where Corbin Dunn, Sara Williams and Jason Heimann will be your main hosts. Nathan Hoover will organize Coker/29er/long & fast alternate rides (on dirt) along with the usual highly technical MUni rides. It may be a while for details, but Santa Cruz is the base location.
A huge thanks to all the dozens of people who helped out this weekend! Events like this, on such a shoestring budget, are not possible for a small handful of people to do. Tons of people pitched in and made it the success that it was. Thanks to the cooks, grocery-buyers and setter-uppers at the Saturday dinner. Thanks to the builders of the Trials course, the dozen-or-more judges, and everyone who made all traces of the course disappear when we were done and packed out the trash. Thanks to the guy who gave up the bearing on his Torker so Leonard Ponce could ride his (broken) unicycle on Sunday. Thanks to everyone who made phone calls or otherwise helped get the word out on the venue and schedule changes. Thanks to Jeannine, Eric, Rod and Nathan and everyone else for helping out with cabin stuff. Thanks to the Johnson family for all they do, from providing a big “MUni bus” to housing, to advice, local venues and dinner. And thanks to everyone I didn’t list!
Registration details:
My registration list has 82 people on it. Six were pre-registered but were unable to make it, leaving us with about 76 participants. This may be a MUni Weekend record! A few participants managed to make it through the entire weekend without giving me a registration form (not just Jeff, but Dan, Chris, and possibly others). A few people also still owe a registration fee and I’ll be sending you emails. Don’t worry so much about the forms at this point, guys… 
We might also have set a new record with most # of states/locations represented. We had 48 participants from California. The rest were divided between British Columbia, Ontario, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, New York, and I think New Jersey, but registered as New York. Our first registrant was Hudson Moore from Ohio, but he couldn’t make it.
T-shirts:
More about them in a following post…
I can bring a few fellow muniacs!
