Circling back to the Tower Rd, we climbed to the Blue Rock and then took the fork for the towers. Then we took the second fork to the left, which leads to Supercross. We stopped a little way out on the ridge and ate our sandwiches in the sun, with a grand view of Lake Whatcom below.

Retracing to the road, we took the first trail to the left (or the right as we had ridden in). This is one end of the Big Easy, which proved to be a memorable trail. After dropping down a chute for a hundred yards or so, we took the right fork and found ourselves in the deep forest on a quite technical, steep, side-camber traverse that climbed pretty steadily.

There were several logs laid across the trail at the beginning, but once in it you could see that a lot of trail building has been going on there recently. There were places were new log works had been laid on the outside of the trail to hold it, and other places were the trail had obviously been rerouted very recently -- the dirt was very soft, like it had been put down within the last week, and we were the first to pas over it.

About a third of the way up the Big Easy, we came to a wild series of very steep fall-away turns. At the top, at the point of no return, someone has tacked a 7-11 "Big Gulp" cup onto a tree. "Control is an issue," observed Russ dryly, adding that he had seen some spectacular crashes here.

A little further on, we came to a spot where some wag had set up a highway sign warning of windy road for 1 1/2 miles. By now it was obvious that we had entered the Big Easy on the wrong end. We should have come in on the uphill end, which would have made much more of it rideable (I pushed my bike up at least half of it).

Toward the end, I passed a couple of riders on trick Dean titanium hardtails heading the other way. Climbing back up the road, we met the two Dean guys just as they were coming out the other end of the Big Easy. The lead guy said Mark Belles told him I was just starting on GalbraithMt.com. His name is Jerry Kingslein, and he owns Bandito Burrito in downtown Bellingham. He is also an amazing technical rider. Not only did he climb up the trench at the end of the Big Easy (see photo), but he rode down the cliff at the end of Devilcross.

This was the best display of technical riding I've ever seen with my own eyes, I think. The cliff was mostly exposed bedrock, in three sections, for a total of maybe 100 vertical feet. The guy dropped off the top, hop-skidded twice, came momentarily to a quivering, poised stop above a nasty lateral root, navigated the root with a nifty brake-release hop, skidded down a semi-sheer rock face to the viewers' right, and then ripped the last third of it straight down the rock.

Russ and I continued on up the logging roads to the Arsenio Loop Rd, and then ripped back down Candy, Appendix, and the Ridge Trails to arrive back at our cars on Birch St at dusk, still talking about the guy on the Dean.

Approximately 2600 verts.

Vert Quest chronicles "The Man Known As Mongo's" pursuit of the World Record for climbing on a mountain bike, 404,000 vertical feet, or the vertical equivalent of 13 sea-level-to-summit ascents of Mt. Everest during a 12 month period. Mongo's mountain bike climbing tricks are distilled in Mongo's Over-the-top Guide to Climbing.