The adventures continue at South Lake Tahoe, Stop #1 of the NeuroAdventures World Tour! DT, Clinkie and I tackled the legendary Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride on this 4th day of the trip, starting with a 2.8 mile hike-a-bike climb from Luther Pass off the 89. The 5.2 mile descent that followed had a nice variety of rock gardens and flow sections with natural embedded granite step-down jumps, all on pine-forest singletrack. Near the bottom, they have started to build a few kicker jumps to spice things up; hopefully this trend will continue and the next time we visit it will have dozens of park-like tabletops and maybe some gap jumps for the hardcore aficionados (i.e. – not me… ;-).
Got the neurotransmitters flowing with the nice mix of shaded forest (serotonin) and sustained uphill to begin (endorphin+anandamide). The fun but not too scary technical stuff got the norepinephrine working and helped keep the flow state going for almost an hour. And, of course, camaraderie = oxytocin…
So, I will award this one a +8.5 Dopamine Rating – not quite as high as yesterday’s ride, with its extra pucker-factor from the exposed rock staircases on Monument Pass. But this is still an exceptional score, and one that proves that Mr. Toad’s lives up to the hype!
Kudos to the crew for planning another great ride!
Here’s a link to the video to see what you’re missing:
NeuroAdventures 