Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Rainy in the early part of the day, so I focused on getting some stuff some around the house. One of the things on my list was Fixing Caroline's Bike. Somebody gave her a cheap, non-functioning bike a while ago (a year? a couple of years?), and she asked if I could fix it. It's been hanging in my garage since. The main problem was that the rear shifting was completely nonfunctional and the front only half worked. I took apart the thumb shifters and lubed things up, then reconnected the cables and adjusted everything. Then I took it out for a shakedown ride to make sure everything was working. Not too warm out, but full humidity. Shifting is very spot-on, and I just needed to tweak the bakes after the ride to make them quieter. No suspension, but the fat tires soaked up the rough pavement on this loop. The only hairy moment was coming down Pearl Hill Road at a pretty good clip, and I had forgotten about the free-range goats, one of which busted out of the woods in front of me to get back to the yard. Startling, though not really close to a collision. So now the next time I have a chance to see Caroline, I can get this bike out of my garage.

I was texting with my brother last night, the conversation started with pictures of his bringing his older daughter to start her sophomore year at UVM, but after some digression we ended up discussing a bike trip from when we were younger. There were five of us: me, Alan, a friend of his and that kid's mom, and our mom. Just a one-day trip, to the beach. 60 miles, with camping gear, because we spent the night, then Dad drove down and picked us up the next day (I don't remember if that was the plan, or if he came because overnight and the next day we got drenching rain.) No sag wagon, no cell phones, no helmets of course. I hadn't thought about it in years. I was 14, so that's not too unreasonable. But Alan and the other kid were only 9.

Who knew? I didn't know. My intent was to ride over to Robbs Hill, but when I got to the top of Elmwood I decided to go straight and see how far the road went, maybe figure out where the snowmobiles go through. I found a trail, and it led to an extensive network of trails. Generally quite nice woods, interesting topography, a mishmash of private land and a few publicly owned parcels. Definitely worth some additional visits, I only scratched the surface of the trail network, and the riding was very good, though it does not appear well-trafficked. Nothing at all shown on OSM.

C • well-trafficked 2

WBSW, the far SW. There were some trails on the basemap that I had never explored, so I went to check them out. The one next to the parking area (not on the base) was a dead-end, but then I went up the primary one that I was interested in, which does something like what the rough guess on the base looks like, with some short side trails, and some substantial ones that go into the adjacent privately held land. The terrain out here has a few pockets of nice woods, but is on the whole pretty laurelly. Then I went on a trail that Jon had looked at, and went off through a section of woods that is strategically located, and not too terrible, but it's not mapped well enough to send people through at this point, and doesn't seem worth the effort to improve it (it's pretty clear that Jon considered it not worth using, and I don't disagree). I took familiar trails back south, and went down one that I had run past countless times but had never explored, and which isn't on the base. As I expected, it heads into somebody's back yard. The shortest way back from there was to bushwhack, and the laurel got really dense. I got to see (and climb) an interesting rocky outcrop that was on the base, then back into the green. With no compass, in thick vegetation, carrying an unfieldchecked basemap that was getting hard to read in The Dim, where did I end up? I'm an orienteer, I came out exactly where I parked my car, of course. All that laurel was pretty wet from rain earlier in the day, and I was pretty much soaked.

Something like Mystery Blazes, anyway. I had intended to go for a mountain bike ride, but at 5 PM the project manager asked if I had a few minutes, and we spent the next 80 minutes playing cat's cradle with red tape. We did get a bunch of it untangled, but it was a painful process, with me patiently trying to explain stuff that is kind of outside of his level of understanding.

Anyway, after that I just went out the door and went for a run. It sure is dry out there, I just walked across the Mulpus. I had though there might be a boundary marker in the riverbed at the confluence, but I didn't see one.

Little bit: brought the boards and stuff from the small shed over to the pile. At this point, basically all that's left out there that isn't in the piles is small enough that I need to start stuffing it into trash bags.

With Nancy, In The Dim. A bunch of trails, then a dirt road, and some pavement at the end. I wasn't sure exactly where it was, but it looks like this loop circumnavigated the site of the old hang gliding school.

A little spin to the south. I haven't worked on the front derailleur yet, so I just kept it in the middle ring, and that was fine. Post-rain and very steamy.

In honor of the passing of Anthony Martignetti, I had a big plate of Prince spaghetti tonight. Even though it wasn't Wednesday.

Another piece of the Midstate, which I kind of screwed up in multiple ways. After flying earlier in the afternoon, I drove down to do this. We stopped flying because the incoming clouds made flying any more a really dumb idea. I dropped my bike off at the place where I intended to finish the run, except that involved going around in a lot of circles because I couldn't figure out how to get to where I wanted to go. Roads that GoogleMaps wanted me to go down turned out to be gated-off dirt roads. Eventually I got close enough and locked the bike to a tree near the end of a dead-end road, and drove back to where I had finished up last time.

Some of this was rough and rocky, would have been too hard to mountain bike. A bunch of it was just paved roads. One section was a formerly paved road, then there was a place through a gorge that probably has a really nice waterfall in the springtime. Or maybe later this same afternoon. I got to the place where I intended to leave the trail and head toward where my bike was, but the road dead-ended into a fenced-off area that looked like a sandpit, and another side branch that just went to some dumping ground. Google Maps had said this would be roads, they even had names like First St. and Fourth St., I was expecting a residential neighborhood. I found a spot where I could cut through a short section of woods to get to a wide ride that went up a steep hill.

At the top of the hill, I looked again at my other map app: weather radar. It had been looking like there was pretty serious thunderstorm activity a bit to the north of me, but I had thought it was going to pass by. The radar indicated that I was going to at least get the edge of it, so I decided to wait out the rain in a relatively sheltered spot.

It wasn't just the edge, I got hammered by a thunderstorm. I managed to stay almost dry by standing on the downwind side of a tree (the day's prevaining wind had been SW, but during the storm, the wind was howling out of the NE). It didn't last all that long, maybe 10-20 minutes. Fortunately, there was a dirt road adjacent to the ride, and it looked like it was the one that led to my bike, so when the rain let up, off I went.

I reached the gate much sooner than I expected, and started looking in the woods on the right for my bike. But although things looked familiar, I came to a house on the left that I didn't remember... huh? I checked with my phone, and... doh! I wasn't on the road to my bike, I had looped back and was heading back along the Midstate, the way I had come! That's why it looked familiar. I briefly considered just retracing my steps to the car, but that would be a long way, so I turned around.

I got back to where I had sheltered, and there was another road, which the GPS indicated was the one I wanted. It went around the upper rim of a huge quarry, and the "residential streets" I had been expecting are actually the tiered extraction roads within the quarry. That road did in fact lead me back to my bike. A better choice would have been to go a bit further on the Midstate, to the center of Oxford, but that would have extended the bike ride back longer than I wanted for today.

And back to the car. For the first half of this, the rain came back, though without the wind, but honestly, I was already pretty wet by that time, so whatever.

And amusingly, the place where I had locked up the bike was very close to a familiar spot, I recognized it when I made the last turn in the car up the dead end road: I attended a notable wedding there once.

C • Wedding 3