Giant Bikes treated Claire and I to another great day at Northstar Ski Resort.  It was quite a luxury, there were only about 20 people total on the whole mountain and Giant supplied brand new 2009 Demo bikes for us to ride.  I spent most of the day on a Giant Anthem X2.  Claire rode the Giant Cypher.  The Anthem was incredible.  It climbs like nobody’s business, but I was able to ride it down Livewire with it’s 8 foot jumps.  We did a couple of pure downhill runs, but ended up riding across the face of the mountain and doing some great single track to test out the handling of these bikes.  I have spent most of the last 10 years or so riding single speed mountain bikes, so having the gears was an adjustment by itself.  Both of my single speed bikes are hard tails, so I was a little leery about how the Anthem would climb, but I found that I could climb in a bigger gear if I wanted to and the rear wheel would stick to the ground like glue.  For the last run of the day, I did take out a Giant Glory.  That is a whole different experience.  You can almost just point that bike downhill and let it go.  If you are going to do some downhilling, you owe it to yourself to take out a real downhill bike.  Giant arranged a three bedroom condo for us for the night, so we didn’t have to drive home dusty.