Me vs. Tent Caterpillars

It was a beautiful day today so instead of getting important things done I went mountain biking at Sundance. As much as I enjoy riding the various trails around here there is something nice about having a chair lift take you to the top of the mountain and though there are a few uphill climbs, they are very short and I never had to drop to my small ring up front.

So there I was at the summit point of the lift and I drop down to where the trails diverge and I decide to try a different trail than I have in the past and it turns out to be a winner. A little way down I hit a patch of spider webs and realize there were a bunch of caterpillars caught in them. After I clean the spider webs off of every surface of me and my bike I get going again. I soon realize after getting pummeled again and again by hanging caterpillars that these little guys are spinning their own webs and apparently have adapted to getting moved about by latching onto mountain bikers, very coy little caterpillars, very coy.

After about 15 min. I started getting really annoyed at the large number of webs and caterpillars that kept getting lodged all over me, including my beard. It's somewhat odd to feel a caterpillar crawling through my goatee. At one point I was headed through a little canopy of trees and came to a skidding halt when I saw the mother load of silk webs and caterpillars. It looked like something out of Indiana Jones, there was a wall of silk and probably 10,000 caterpillars all over in, on and hanging from the trees. I couldn't find another way through so I just had to duck and avoid as many of them as I could. There was an older guy that came through right after me so we knocked caterpillars off of each other for a minute while he told me about swimming in the pond next to us when he was a kid. We probably looked like monkeys standing there picking bugs off of each other.

Lucky for me the caterpillars were only on the aspens so once I made it to the pines I was able to ride properly again. It's awfully hard to hold a line, dodge rocks and roots and corner at speed while getting hit in the face by big juicy caterpillars. I decided to take other trails after that and didn't have nearly the trouble since most of those trails were in the pines.

I'm quite happy to report that not only did I come home without injury I also managed to stay on my bike the whole 3 hours I spend riding; something I hadn't managed to do on previous visits to Sundance.