Free-Riding at its purest..........

While on a week away from work with the wife and kids in Vermont, I made the point of looking up some of my good friends at a local valley town bike shop and get out on their weekly Thursday evening ride......
I've been visiting this group once a year, in July, for the last 3 years. Always a great bunch, they host an early Sunday morning 'church' ride as well as the Thursday ride. They are a great eclectic mix of people from the bike shop owner and his wife and dogs, artists, dairy farmers, musicians, Disney animation specialists, carpenters, mechanics, etc. The one thing they all have in common is the intimate network of trails that are either cutback or re-created every year (as one rider said, "ride them or lose them, as they will become overgrown in one season") combined with old jeep roads, logging trails, and shhhhh....some NF trails thrown into the mix that just cant be left to rot.
The other thing that most of these riders have in common are their over-40 pound riding machines......Stinkies, Dawgs, Bullits, with the occasional Rocky Mountain and much less occasional Sinister (overheard as "InyerSister") and Kona hardtails, all the bikes are hardcore, with longtravel forkage and the stickiest and tackiest and fattest of the fat tires available.
We got all 12 bikes in the back of a pickup quite nicely I must say, all upside-down, so all that was seen was this great mass of fat tires sticking out of the truck bed. And myself and a young rider behind the last one to hold them in place. We had driven uphill for about 3 miles already, and There I was with my lightweight custom steel hardtail rig, spinning uphill on a fairly steep jeep road for another two miles.......of course, I was the first one to the top, waiting for the burly rigs to make it up. All gathered for a breath and/or puff of the 'poetry weed' and to savor the valley views from the ridge........followed by the descent.
Now when you're at the top of a Vermont mountain range there really is only one way to get back home. Not wanting to follow the exact fall line for obvious reasons, these guys have cut some of the sickest, sweetest, steepest singletrack I've ever ridden. In fact some of it I couldn't ride. It was then that realized why they were all riding these 45lb moto-styled steeds. They were built for this.....these guys were flying! They assigned one of their slower guys to stick with me(as they always do with 'flatlanders')--it was fast getting dark, as the sun began to disappear behind the mountains.......
we got back just in time--my old peepers arent what they used to be at night, and I could hardly see the trail in front of me.....