Merry Land IV

So, through divine intervention I managed to halt the Nicolai before sailing off to certain disfiguring injury or death. I backtracked and bushwacked around what was until then the nastiest rock drop I had ever seen only to discover that rest of the "trail" was more of the same. I have ridden in a lot of places, but nothing as gnar as what I saw in the "other side" of the Frederick Watershed. Delmer cruised this track like he was coming back from Starbuck's on the sidewalk with a cappuccino in one hand. LLF was breathing hard and had big eyes, but was surviving it with a dab here and there. I had to walk/crawl half the trail. When I finally got down near the bottom and could see that the line held no more extreme ugliness, I let the Nicolai run. I was hauling a ton of ass and about six feet off the ground when it became startlingly obvious that the little jump I had just cleaned was a hip. The trail disappeared somewhere off to the left. I had plenty of time to think. I spit the bike and curled into the fetal position and waited for gravity to do it's job. Eventually I touched down in a pile of rocks roughly the size of Hewlett Packard Officejet 6210 All-in-One printers. The first impact points were my right hip bone and the right side of my head. I have no memory of it, but the various cuts and brusies underneath my right shinguard suggest that I bounced into the air and smacked my right leg onto some more rocks and finally plopped down on the opposite side of the pile. My right hip bone was hurting so intensely I failed to notice that I could not see out of my right eye. Delmer and LLF eventually climbed back up to the crash site. They didn't bother to ask if I was O.K. When someone you have been riding with but have not seen in ten minutes is found face down in a pile of rocks, you already know the answer. After a frightening while, vision slowly came back to my right eye. I rode out the rest of the trail, except for an 80 foot long tree that had fallen across a stream and then had been chain-sawed flat on the top. I might have been able to ride that, but the ten foot section that was about 8 inches under water and therefore completely invisible spooked me a bit. Later that afternoon, LLF and Delmer took me to look at the really technical stuff and I have to say, it was nothing that I would have recognized as a bike trail. The boys at the Frederick Watershed are not faacking around.