hurronnicane

A big group of us went out there a couple of weeks ago for an annual camping/riding trip only to find out that 95% of the trails were closed with no timetable for their re-opening. The park ranger said they had received 36" of rain since September 1st! The issue wasn't that they were too wet but that they were washed away! We were hoping to ride most of the 40 miles of trails out there over the weekend and had to make alternate plans. We did ride down the road to the Bandera Bike Park and while it is clearly a work in progress it was fun to check it out and it has a lot of really promising terrain.

It was one of those unnamed trails. I actually saw the lower strands on the ground but I guess my helmet visor prevented me from the seeing the one just above eye-level. So I popped up the front wheel over the lower strands and just as I was trying to hop the rear wheel over the wire, the previously unnoticed strand caught me between the helmet and my sunglasses. It made a nice deep cut. That was when out I found that all of wound wipes had dried up. I did a fair amount of reassessing what was in my first kit after that.

After ripping my face open with an unseen strand of barbed wire, I started carrying a small mirror so that in the future I could determine how bad I was cut. This was right above my eyebrow and it bled profusely. I thought I had stopped the bleeding and cleaned it up but when I got back to the car I looked like an extra from a horror movie. This helped explain the reactions I was getting from hikers I passed on the greenbelt...