Winter and snow, dreaded by most mountain bikers. Many people hang up their bike for the winter, but this was not an option for me. I kept busy as long as I could with a shovel, but this year, the BC weather was not even allowing that. So California was the answer. I usually do a California trip each winter and this year is no exception. The Santa Cruz and Aptos area is an easy choice. There are loads of great riders and friends in the area, along with a bunch of dirt jumps, skate parks and trails to keep you busy.
 
I started my trip on January 9th in Aptos, meeting up with my good buddies Brandon Semenuk and Ryan (R-Dog) Howard. For the first few days we shredded the local jumps and skate parks getting farmilar with the area again. On the 13th Brandon and I loaded up his truck with our 20's, hard tails and trail bikes bound for SoCal. We were heading for Troy Lee Designs in Laguna Beach for a new helmet launch. There was no way that we were heading south without a visit to Woodward West. So we left a couple days early to visit the famous facility. I spent a lot of time in the foam pit learning and dialing in some of my more scary tricks.
 
When we were done at Woodward we arrived in Laguna Beach and put our trail bikes to work. We checked out the product launch and joined in on a huge TLD group shred through the SoCal hills. After the TLD product launch, we stayed around to attend the Supercross stop in Anaheim on Saturday, January19th, so  we had a couple days to kill down south. We hit up Heath Pinter's place, a BMX dirt jump legend. He invited us over to his house in the Riverside area, where he has an amazing set of jumps. We spent the day shredding his spot, as well as another set of jumps at Stephen Murray's place. That was one of the best days I have had in a long time. Meeting two BMX legends, guys I have looked up to all my life was awesome enough, let alone riding their jumps.

The next day was the Supercross. We spent the first half of the day on our BMX bikes hitting the streets in Huntington Beach.  There was a high school we rode that had more features than you could shake a stick at. It was like a level straight out of Tony Hawk Pro Skater. After our street ride we loaded up the truck  and headed for Supercross in Anaheim. MX is an insane sport to watch, with twenty guys on the track all after first place, there is high level of danger. The races went smooth with no injuries. After the race we jumped in the truck heading north back to Santa Cruz to once again meet up and ride with our good buddies.

Stay tuned for part 2 trip of my California trip in Santa Cruz/ Aptos area.