Dry Hill in the Rain

We returned to Dry Hill in Port Angeles for Round #2 of the NW Cup. This race was originally scheduled for Ski Bowl at Mt. Hood, but due to Oregon Covid regulations, it couldn’t be pulled off…so here we are again.

Weather for the weekend was forecast to be more typical of the area in comparison to the full sunshine we had for Round #1 - it was going to rain, drizzle, and sprinkle both days. I’m fine with this. I have raced a lot in terrible conditions, so bring it on!

For practice, the wet barely made it through the trees, so the race course was amazing and tacky. It was also more technical and steep compared to the course of few weeks ago and I really liked it.

Knowing the competition was strong, I worked hard in practice on smoothing out the tight, flat corners and looking for doubles. I rode with our Bend neighbor Andy, which was really great. He had some good feedback for several sections, and that combined with GoPro footage, helped me tune up my runs a lot. I was feeling good by the end of practice.

After practice, we once again visited Olympic National Park. We hiked along the Sol Duc River and saw the falls and plenty of huge, beautiful trees.

On race day, the weather was all over the place, but hard rain pretty much held off through my one practice run in the morning. With three hours to kill until drop time, I explored some of the other sick trails at Dry Hills.

Rain started sprinkling once I was in the start gate and part way down my race run I was flagged down by one of the track marshalls. The kid before me had taken a hard crash. I was stopped for about 20 seconds, and once let to continue, I took off as fast as I could, not knowing if I’d be able to do a re-run.

Once at the bottom, I pleaded my case to the race director and they let me do a re-run. Happy about this, but exhausted from my previous run, I immediately went back up in the U-Haul van and was sent to the start gate. Rain had started pelting hard at this point and I took off as fast as I could. I was pretty tired though and around half way down I slipped and crashed. I ended up bending my derailleur and couldn’t shift. The rain was torrential by the time I crossed the finish line. Needless to say, I didn’t get the time or result I wanted. That said, I felt really good about my riding in practice and look forward to racing at Tamarack in Idaho in a couple of weeks.