“Sounds great,” I said. I was barely listening as I distractedly watched a group of five bikers in proximity fly.... and I mean fly, down a trail. They leaned hard into a berm, dust trailing behind consistently before it abruptly stopped as they each, one by one, were launched into the air from what I was sure was a deceivingly large jump. “That’s A-Line,” said Tom, nodding to the trail I was watching.

I straightened up in my seat, deciding I should probably start paying attention if that was the goal by tomorrow. We were told we could roll over every jump if worse came to worst. The greatest fear then simply became getting yelled at by a much younger, much faster, much better rider... or even worse, a group of them. But we wisely decided to start out easy, with a warmup run, working our way through the progressive lines recommended to us which would help build our confidence and let us know if we were worthy to even give A-Line a try.

The next few hours were spent learning to trust the bike and ourselves, starting with less intimidating berms and small jumps. By early afternoon we were confidently working our way through our list of progressively difficult trails and hitting tabletops, drops, step ups, and jumps at faster and faster speeds. We were feeling good, and we all only had two slide outs and one crash (injury free) all day. We were disappointed when the lift was closed due to lightning, but we were excited to rest and hit it hard the following day.

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