This week I got back to ‘work’ after a few days off. After a bit of a break from work I felt refreshed and ready to get down to some teaching! Summer is in full swing now and we’ve had a solid week of clear blue skies combined with a nice breeze, which is perfect weather for riding!

Whistler is a beautiful place to spend the summer!

It was also my graduation from university this week- so despite my absence from the graduation ceremony back in the UK, I decided to hold my own by giving the ‘Dwayne Johnson’ step up a go. This is a line I’d wanted to do since arriving in Whistler, and it’s fair to say I was pretty stoked after hitting it!

Dwyane PL from John Inman on Vimeo.

On Friday it was my flatmate Lukas’ birthday, and since he was turning 19, the legal drinking age in Canada, we went out to sample Whistler’s nightlife. Our night on the town included ordering 350 Chicken Wings for only 50 cents each from Crystals, for the 15 or so people in our group!  It was a great night out and it showed, given the slight lack of guides showing up for work on the following morning….… for me it was a great chance to get another ‘rest’ day in.

Sunday was pretty busy, with many of us getting multiple lessons. Itching to get some riding in for ourselves, myself and a few others headed up to mess about on ‘B-Line and ‘Crank it up’, which led to some wild inside lines as we made use of the dry and loose conditions! So much fun..

Smashing turns and wrecking berms!

Myself, Steffen and George rode the ‘Top of the World’ trail on Monday. Since we are full time bike park staff, we all get a free seasons pass for the trail, another sweet perk of being a bike guide! Again we were blessed with bright blue sky, which made the 360 degree vista that much more impressive. After taking the obligatory tourist pictures, next to the Whistler stone statue, we headed down the trail. It was another awesome experience, as the backdrop of the black tusk in the background made it even more epic! In fairness we did have to be concentrate fairly hard on the trail as it is a double black diamond.. The trail is made even more interesting to ride given the changing conditions as you descend.

At the top it’s all rocks and dust, but as you progress down, you reach the tree line and it gets into some nice ‘loamy and tacky’ single track, before reaching the park boundary and heading back down into more park style riding like ‘Freight Train’ then ‘Duff Man’, before hitting ‘A line’. All in all it took us about 3 hours. Great trail that is really different from riding in the park!

Obligatory ‘tourist’ photo

We made a cheeky edit of our ride down, complete with mountain biking cliches.

TOTW from John Inman on Vimeo.