Made in China or Female Bill Riddle?

We rode at Unicoi last night & as we were approaching a climb, I went to shift to an easier gear & my shifter went flying off the handlebars!!

I yelled Stop! And immediately bailed off the bike, unsure what was about to happen.

The metal bracket that held the shifter on the bike had broken off & the shifter & cables were hanging off.

Clark inspected it, told me I needed to be easier on my stuff or he was gonna start calling me Bill Riddle.

He used a zip tie to secure the shifter to the bars & put me in the easiest gear in the back. My left shifter was fine, so I had 3 gears up front to use to finish the ride.

Now, I really don't think I am hard on stuff. There are 3 possibilities as to what happened:

Failure due to being made in China
Or
Failure due to weakening from my crash last week
Or
Failure due to my sheer brute strength





We got back on with the ride, and climbed a bit, descended a bit, next thing I hear is more yelling, this time it was Clark and Woody doing the yelling ahead of me.... BEAR. BEAR!!!  Or so I thought.

It was actually BRAKE! BRAKE!!




Wow!  There was a newly down, big old tree!  Its hard to tell from the pictures how big it is, but it is massive! 




The trail needs some love before somebody gets hurt and further eroison occurs with the rain.  Its at the bottom of a pretty fun downhill. Woody said we just need some shovels & picks to move some dirt & rock to build the trail back up. I have lots of shovel experience and can put my sheer brute strength to good use out there.

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