Blake Robinson's NorCal ride report

Hello everyone,

Day 2 here in 'kind of sunny' California is panning out to be a rest/travel day. We are driving south to Tehachapi to ride Woodward West for a couple days. I am so stoked.

Yesterday we drove through beautiful Napa Valley to get to the suburbs of Sacramento to ride at Spangler's Jumps. The place was awesome. Ideal for all of us who dream of having some open land, a huge barn for riding, a personal bike shop, and perfect sunsets every night. Oh ya, and a front loader of course. :)

I had a chance to meet and ride with a long time mentor of mine, Randy Spangler. Randy has been riding dirt jumps and freeride since the dawn of time. He is 42 years young and still killing it. We shredded his dirt jump's for a couple hours then spent some time on the pump track. (a pump track is a very small tight intertwined course that is built with rollers and small humps, so you can practice turns, flow, and speed without pedaling.) Randys pump track is the sickest I have ever seen. He and I ended up being the last two on it. We called it a night at about 10 p.m.. . . time to turn off the floods.

So I keep referring to this location as Randy's place, however its not his at all, he just built the dirt section of it. The house and land actually belongs to super rad couple, Terry and Alison. Terry owns College Bikes in North Sac. He races drag cars, well kind of drag...he races the super long skinny cars with really small front wheels and huge rear wheels....well all you need to know is that they go about 275 mph and are loose cannons right from the get-go. He does that for a hobby amongst many other things. His wife Alison is super nice as well. We spent about a half hour talking dogs. Here are some pics of their Bouviers...only about a year old and as huge and clumsy as ever. Way nice and extrenely smart dogs.

Anyway, here are some pics of the jumps, the pump track, and the poonches. (pups).

More updates later,

Blake