in which i can't think of a title but we went mtbing

H had gone for a road ride Friday night, one that was a bit longer than he's been doing lately.  He didn't eat anything before heading out and ended up bonking about ten miles out from home.  He made it back just fine but he was pretty beat for the rest of the evening and the next morning, he admitted that his legs were still a little fatigued.  Great! I said, let's go MTBing!  We got on the trail in Park City a little after 9 a.m. and I was hopeful that Round Valley wouldn't be too busy at that time; on the drive in, we passed field after field after field of youth soccer tournaments, plus the Park City Kimball Arts Festival was in full swing - maybe folks would be off doing those things and not on the trails.  As it happened, the trails were not crowded at all.  There were a few MTBers (we saw the same three-person tour group five different times), some dog walkers and a handful of trail runners.

I struggle with trail runners.  The general rules are: downhill traffic yields to uphill traffic, bicyclists yield to pedestrians, and everyone yields to horses.  But when I'm hiking/running, I always step aside for MTBers, regardless of who is going uphill, because it's easier for me since I'm on foot and not wrangling a bike.  On Saturday, as we were riding downhill towards Hammerhead, two runners were coming up; I pulled over but they waved me through with a smile.  Later, while we were going down the backside of Rambler, I pulled over twice to let runners come up the hill past me, despite their telling me I could come through, and then each of them thanked me.  But while climbing towards Rambler's sixteen switchbacks, I came upon two trail runners coming down.  It was a narrow bit of trail but easy for them to step off, and I was going uphill.  I didn't pull over for them and they yelled at me about it.  **shrug**

Cruising up the Nouvelle Loop

As far as the ride went, I felt like I climbed pretty well, while H was definitely riding slower than he usually does.  There also was no headwind for the final climb back to the truck which put me in a very good mood.  Since it was a beautiful day, we stopped at our picnic stop post-ride.  A hummingbird buzzed us for about a minute, checking out my pink watch and the red of the taillights and on the PBR cans.  And just as we were finishing up, a Nuaquos truck pulled up and handed us a couple of sports drinks.  They were just driving around, stopping at trailheads and giving out their product.  They took our picture - since we were looking all sporty, sitting in front of our dirty MTBs - and took off.  Our guess: they only took our photo since we were wearing hats and they couldn't tell how old we really are.