Last weekend’s Silveroxx Downhill Mountain Bike Festival at Silver Mountain, ID was a blast! On tap were two days filled with enough high-speed gravity action to satisfy any adrenaline junkie. On top of that, it was a great time to hang out with friends from the other side of the state who I only get to see once or twice a year — and to meet some new folks too.
Saturday morning was taken up with the short-course DH Jam. This year’s course was about a 2-2½-minute run down the Jackass line on the upper part of the mountain, to the bottom of Chair 5. It was done in a jam-session format; meaning you could do as many runs as you wanted inside the 9 am and 1 pm window, with your fastest run counting.
If you had any energy left — or are just a plain ol’ masochist — the afternoon race was a Super-D that encompassed about 2/3 of the mountain’s elevation. In typical super-D fashion, there was a LeMans start that launched you immediately into a (hot! — temps in the high 80s) 3/10-mile fire road climb to spread the field. The road wound around the knob that houses to top of Silver’s gondola, where there were more double-track passing ops, as the road that plunged down to one of the lift bases. From there, a single-track climb of about a half-mile started. If you were lucky, the traffic in this section was light, since there were few places wide enough to pass. That trail crested on a ridge, where a short double-track section connected (finally!) to some downhill singletrack. This trail spit us out on one last access road and the sprint to the finish.
Saturday night was capped with really good pizza and pretty good beer at one of the new restaurants in the village, accompanied by a fully-loud and semi-talented local band.
Sunday was the signature Endurance Downhill. This is the long course, which stretches from the top of the gondola all the way back to the valley floor 3,700 feet below. Depending on the rider, it’s about a 13-20-minute all-out hammer. The run is punctuated by a couple of short access-road connectors; but there’s no resting on those, because neither are quite steep enough to allow you to just coast. The Experts got to wear in a new section of Expert-only trail that is feature-filled and a bit gnarly for a race line. One brief practice run earlier in the morning was the first look many of us even got of this new line. As it was, I played it conservative through that section, knowing if I lost a few seconds through there, I had plenty of more course that I was more familiar with to wick it on and make up for it. By the time you got to the last woods section near the bottom, your fingers tingled, your lungs burned and you had to fight the impulse to just coast when you new you should still pedal-pedal-pedal. But if you overcame all that, you got to the bottom knowing you’d spent it all on the mountain that day.
The awards for both days were held after all of the racing was done Sunday afternoon. Silver threw a twist in the prizes for the Super-D by only giving out awards for the top-ten overall finishers. Time will tell whether or not this move will fulfill Silver’s goal of sparking more interest and participation for this event. Placing and awards for the short and long downhill events were done by more conventional class breakdowns.
It’s always fun being part Silveroxx and it’s all the sweeter if you can come home uncrashed and unscathed; and if you get to bring home a bit of hardware, well, that’s just icing on the cake. Silver Mountain hasn’t “arrived” yet as a world-class (or even North American-class) bike park; but the bones are there and the organizers have a lot of enthusiasm and are doing better every year. Siveroxx rocked.
Provided by Doug Minor
Dirt Digler