We hammered it down with a large rock, and Mark said he wanted to keep riding -- he'd just stay out of the small ring! OK. Well, he did it all the way up the Ridge trail and was -- if anything -- even faster than normal since he was pushing a bigger gear than he wanted sometimes.

Then just at the beginning of Bob's Trail, he stopped again with chain ring problems. Now we discovered that the small chain ring had lost all its bolts, and was sort of spinning "freely," except for the fact that it was bent so much again that the crank wouldn't spin, again.

We couldn't figure out how this could happen since he hadn't even been in the small ring, but once again we beat the small ring semi straight with a rock This time Mark cut a couple lengths of elastic cord off his hydration pack and lashed the small ring to the middle ring.

This seemed to work as we hammered down Bob's Trail ( I made the tight corner at the top and several log crossings I'd never attempted before, thanks to the fact that I was riding behind Mark and had the benefit of his line laid out before me).

We continued on through several of the still pretty muddy Galbraith Lane trails -- Banjoland, Bunny Trails -- and then climbed the road all the way to the top of Purple Heart. We jumped off on the Dirty Sock -- which is the one after Keystone on the left as you're heading for Supercross. The top was a non-stop full on series crisises for me, but I rode it all to the huge mud bog at the bottom of the first series of faces.

Then we picked up Keystone and rode it out to the road up from Supercross to the Arsenio Loop Rd. Lower Arsenio, followed by the Candies and back out to the sluiceway, and  Intestine. Mark's bike began to give him trouble again at this point, so we bailed down the logging road and then the old, motorcycle-trashed trail to the road below Upper Ridge Trail.

From there we ripped the Ridge Trail, but just above the last fallaway at the bottom, Mark came to a screeching halt again. Once more the lame little chain ring had gotten bent and wedged into something -- this time the swing arm. ("I should start carrying a rock in my pack as standard equipment," Mark quipped with surprising good humor).

When we parked on Lakeway, I was headed home to meet Shanna after school and Mark was headed down to Fairhaven Bike. TBC...

Approximately 2200 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.