Quinn is riding a Scott Scale Jr 20 that we bought last year. It's a great little bike that isn't too heavy and actually has a plush front suspension fork that's well-tuned for a 50 pound rider. The most notable shortcoming to the stock Scott was the gearing. With 32/42 Lasco non-replaceable chainrings up front and 6 cogs in the rear ranging from 14 to 28 teeth, the bike was better-suited to street riding than off-roading, particularly if any hill-climbing was involved. I did some gear-inch calculations, and figured out that a 24/36 chainring set would put his gearing in the same general range as the lower end of a standard mountain bike. However, coming up with a crankset that has short, kid-sized 140mm crank arms and accepts the current standard mountain chainrings wasn't easy. We went with the simplest and most economical (relatively) solution. We ordered a TruVativ Isoflow crankset with shortened arms from Bikesmith Design and Fabrication. It has a 24-tooth ring on the inside, a 36-tooth ring in the middle, and a bashguard instead of a chainring in the outer position. It installed easily on the stock square taper bottom bracket, and seems to have about the right chain line. I installed the crankset Friday night, but waited to hit the trail until Sunday when Cindy was not working. Here it is:
Murray Lake Trail is nine miles long, and is the longer but easier of the two trails at Brighton. It was moderately easy, although it starts with a few steep ups and downs that were challenging and intimidating for the kids. In that early challenging section, we passed a couple of less-experienced adult bikers who might not have called trail easy at all. Much of the trail was fast, curvy, and swoopy; the sort of trail that is not super hard, but is really fun in a roller-coaster sort of way. Now that I have this GPS thing figured out, I can create maps of our adventures.
Quinn rode almost the entire trail in his lowest three gears; three gears he's never even had before. Although he said he couldn't tell any difference, he was able to climb hills I'm sure he could not have climbed before. He could not, however, climb all the hills. This was one of those sharp uphill switchbacks with a loose sandy surface.
Cindy got almost all the way through it. She was really enjoying her Superlight on this trail.
We stopped for a snack along South Ore Creek near the entrance to the Murray Lake Campground. The pleasant scenery was tempered by the biting flies and occasional speeding cars. We kept the kids fed and watered much better than I had last weekend, so everyone seemed to be in higher spirits. Nonetheless, by the time we were half way finished, the kids were asking how much longer we had to go.
Most of the trail was deep beneath the thick forest canopy. Occasionally it popped out into the sunshine and we were reminded that the temperature was in the 80's and the sun was shining brightly.
For this ride, I attached my camera case to the waist belt of my Camelbak. I was occasionally able to ride ahead of the rest of the scaq and stop to take pictures as they passed. Here the group easily descended a short curved section of downhill with some sand and a few protruding roots to make it interesting.
We ran across this guy in the middle of the trail. I guess he figured he didn't need a helmet.
This was a very fun trail, and it made for a really fun trip. I'm looking forward to getting back down to ride it again. I'm pretty sure the rest of scaq are too.
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