The higher you climb Boundary Creek, the further your jaw drops.

Now comes word that Ketchum and Sun Valley will host the 2011 and 2012 USA Cycling Mountain Biking National Championships, spanning the very same five days in late July that Team Mojo habitually picks for its “national hardships.” We would much appreciate a finders’ fee! (Or maybe free tickets?)

If you don’t ride it often or hook up with locals, you’re in a world of hurt when it comes to finding your way around Galby’s maze of mostly unsigned trails. You’d better be carrying a map — or better yet, a phone with GalbraithMt.com’s new smart-phone app.

The Guru of Galbraith, Mongo (aka Bruce Brown), has just published his comprehensive, up-to-the-moment map set of the big mountain in smart-phone form. On a three-hour Saturday ride it saved our bacon time and again as we went a-wandering around Galbraith.

No more bike wandering on Galby.

As you can see from the route recorded on our iPhone’s GPS app, Motion X, we had to backtrack a number of times after going off on a trail and getting lost (the little pointies shooting off the perimeter are the turnarounds).



With the GalbraithMt.com set (available from its Web site), we simply pulled out the iPhone from our backpack, checked our bearings, and were ready to keep rolling.

Even if you’re an experienced Galby rider, you’ll find GalbraithMt.com’s set a useful tool. New trails keep popping up all the time, and Bruce is dedicated to updating his maps on an as-needed basis.

Check it out! Galby’s even more fun if you know where you are riding at any given time.

Lead-in ramp to Unemployment Line.

Bruce’s facile documentation makes me look like a real mountain biker — although as he notes in the cedar stump jump, I almost manage to take him out even as I try to avoid hitting a fresher stump right in my flight pattern. Bruce survived to tell the tale, and we all had a great time capping off Tour de Galby with Eric Brown’s fantastic new Unemployment Line and Atomic Dog (which is shaping into arguably Galbraith’s best in Bruce’s opinion, me seconding).

iPhone app Motion X GPS caught it all.

It was a great day, which we caught on our iPhone with Motion X GPS. I love this $2.99 app but it’s not without caveats, which we’ll explore in a forthcoming review. For now the word is, hit Galbraith asap. The trails are buff (Unemployment has berms the size Maverick waves) and you can spend all day riding switchbacks without ever knowing exactly where you are, let alone repeating yourself.

 
The keyboard feels funny.

For 10 days Team Mojo took to the road, exploring Idaho’s far-flung trails in Sun Valley, Stanley, and the all but undocumented panhandle hard by the Canadian border. We left the MacBook behind. The iPhone was almost always out of range. We seldom had Wi-Fi. Our fingers were for gripping the bars, not typing. We did 9-mile climbs and 18-mile downhills. We did forest-carpeted singletrack, we bucked boulders and roots, jumped in alpine lakes, cruised charred sticks of timber burns and grunted up 10,000-foot-high ridges. We crossed raging creeks nearly to our waists, handing our bikes to one another as we tried to maintain footing on mossy rocks we could not see. We got black and blue from crashes, brown from mud, green from meadows and red from when Jim accidentally set the soft fleshy underside of his forearm on a Magura rotor after a screaming 4-mile descent in 92-degree temps.

We got up, ate, rode, ate, rode some more, showered, ate, went to bed. Day after day. In broiling sun, in crackling lightning, in booming thunderclaps, in sodden drizzle. We abused our carbon Ibis Mojos, our Ergon packs and our Sidi shoes — to say nothing of our sunburned shoulders, abraded legs and bludgeoned feet. We were in heaven even when we felt like hell. Distance in miles: About 150. Accumulated elevation gain in feet: Around 25,000. Happiness in cackles: Long into the night.

We chose well. Somewhat belatedly, Idaho is coming into its own as a mountain biking destination. We’ve been riding around Sun Valley since the mid-1990s, abetted early by faxed notes from Seattle mountain biking scribe John Zilly, who drew maps by hand of trails around town and wrote the first mountain-bike guides (no longer available) to the area. In an age of boundless hype, the Idaho Sawtooth region has always struck us as vastly under-appreciated. The endless cross-country trails, gobsmacking views of the Sawtooths and White Clouds, and the spot-on climate have brought us back time and again. [Even as we explored new routes this time we posted "classic" past adventures on BikeIntelligencer.]

John Zilly, circa 1995