Text/Photos: Effraim.

Yesterday was Day 1 of my 2017 Battle in the Rockies trip to Denver, Colorado. James McGraw and Fred Gates once again invited me out to the mile high city to judge this year’s event.

I met Mates Tucek at London Heathrow, Terminal 3 on Monday morning, the flight was delayed by a little bit, but nothing too stressful. Flying time of nine hours, twenty five minutes to Denver. Luckily the movie selection was pretty entertaining, so after watching a couple of movies we were in Denver. Throughout the trip out there, security was really tight and Mates seemed to get searched every time, we counted at least ten times, and each time Mates would style his hair. This amused me a lot, and made the trip out so much fun and the day just seemed to fly by as we caught up and discussed all things flatland and general work life stuff.

This was my fourth trip out to Denver, Colorado for the BITR contest. As always the main man, James McGraw was on hand to pick myself and Mates up from the airport.James lives an hour away from Denver in a small beautiful town called Monument, amazing views of the Rockies as we were greeted by sunny skies and 68 degrees. It’s like tradition that on the trip back to James’ new house we stop off at Five Guys, when in America and all that y’know.

With daylight savings in full flow it was getting dark by the time we got back to the McGraw residence in Monument and we were getting tired. But decided to put the bikes together, we had a slight problem as Mates couldn’t open his bag, quite a sight seeing Mates and James wrestling his bag open. It was all happening to Mates, and we couldn’t stop laughing about it. The vibes already I must say are so good, we built the bikes up at James’ work and what was planned to be an hour session quickly ended up being a 3-4 hour session. All of us nailing some lines we were happy with, Mates and James were going off and a nice back wheel battle was going down whilst I rode front wheel. We didn’t get back to the house till gone midnight, and after a cuppa it was time to hit the sack. Day 1 of the BITR trip was an absolute blast, Day 2 we are riding James slab spot at his house, looking forward to that in the afternoon. I shall hopefully be interviewing James and Mates this week, so also look out for that. I’m out…