Rode Galbraith with Mark and Mark, starting from Whatcom Falls Park, where we were a little surprised to find about 40 Bellingham police cars (I didn't even know that B'ham had that many police cars). The front page of the next day's Herald revealed why -- there were three dead bodies found in apartments on the other side of Electric that morning.

Heading up the Ridge Trail, we ran into Dave Tveit almost immediately. He said that the construction on the ridge is supposed to start within the next two weeks. This struck a blade to my heart since I have just rented an apartment on Whatcom Falls Park to use as an office for GalbraithMt.com. Looks like I'll get about a week before the Ridge Trail as we know it is destroyed.

I was pretty weak on the Ridge Trail and above, but I had one accomplishment: I made the high catwalk / old growth log crossing on Dan's Trail for the first time. After this, we dropped down Flying Squirrel to the bottom two Pigs, which Mark Belles had just brushed out with the used weed whacker he bought.

Finally, Mark Belles led us through a number of the lower Galbraith trails that I know very little about, such as Nick & Pete, the Banjoland, the Bunny Trails, etc. Nick & Pete was quite cool, with a lot of tight turns and log jumpups (we rode it in reverse, it is probably better the other way).

Mark Belles mentioned that the bottom area was logged with a device that cut, stacked, etc. the logs all at once, which left a terrible debris mess behind and resulted in the loss of some of Galbraith's best trails.

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.