The Grand Traverse
Sunday was a great day for riding.. I left home about 8:10 or so headed for Camel’s back park downtown. It was a little chilly, maybe mid 40’s. I made decent time even though the battery on my mp3 player died.
It’s really sad that my little player is dieing the flash turned in to DRAM and the mp3’s just leak away. Seriously I can load a few on there and the be there for a few minutes, and then they’ll disappear. Anyway I thought I could at least use the fm tuner then my battery died 10 minutes from home.
I got to the park and there were a few people there from the group I was meeting. They all got ready and eventually we headed for the hills. I made it to the first good hill and ran it pretty hard to the top, about 250 feet of altitude at an 8% grade (just over 0.5 miles). I got to the top, bombed it back down the hill and met the bulk of the group coming up the hill for the first time. I waited for them to pass and headed back up behind them. One by one I passed each of them and made it to the top first… I’m not sure anyone else was thinking of it as a competition, but it was till fun to win. To their credit, I know they waited to regroup somewhere at the bottom of the hill…
Anyway after that we headed down to the military reserve. That trail had one good surprise… come around a corner drop off about a 1 foot ledge go about 5 feet and go over an erosion prevention log across the trail. Once in military reserve we climbed back up another hill (200 feet or so) and headed back down through a wooded area… Excellent surprise… part of the trail had been washed away leaving sand mud, little branches and over grown crap. Had to crank on the throttle a little bit to power through it, definitely a good choice. From there we went back up a short hill, which is a bit of a trick because you have to hit a switch back right before it gets steep. The trail leveled out for a ways and then we got another excellent 300 foot climb up to the top of the military reserve area. I managed to make it to the top first (maybe because no one else thought we were racing… they were wrong). The others made it after some time and then we went back down to mountain cove rode and back up the surprise trail and then back down to the car… All the ups and downs and the big loop gave that route the name of “The Grand Traverse.”
Back at the cars we decided to go to a little restaurant down town for lunch. I jumped on my bike and headed out. Surprisingly I was the first one there again. I gotta teach these people that everything IS a race (they even had cars).
After lunch I tried to talk some of the folks in to riding a little more but they all had chores or other things to do (Yeesh, Sunday’s are for sports!)… Finally I gave up and headed out to hit table rock (a good 1000 feet of climbing on something steep enough to make me stop and suck wind a few times). I made it up and enjoyed the view for a few minutes then headed back down the trail. By this point in the day I was starting to feel a little fatigue so I took it easy on the downhill (< 20mph). I headed off the east side on a different trail than the one I came up and found a kinda sorta path through some weeds that dumped out in a sub division that I could cut through and get on the green belt.
Once on the green belt I headed for Lucky Peak to check out the dam and see if they opened the flood tubes (it’s only about 10 miles from table rock)… What luck they had opened the tubes and I got to see loads of water spewing out of the bottom of the dam.
I was feeling the extra time on the first hill by this point and decided I should just head home instead of heading to the top of the dam. So I started back for Meridian.
A few miles down the green belt and I got to witness some guys playing on some fast bikes on Warm Springs. I would say I don’t know what possesses a person to jump on a bike with more horse power than my car and do a wheelie down a busy street at 50mph, but I do know the thought processes. It is what drives me to ski fast, ski behind cars, crave more air time off the next bump in the trail, and in general revel in the intensity of the moment. Some of the guys were hanging out on a pull out and I stopped to compliment them on their use of the day.
From there I was just a normal ride home, I don’t remember cutting off any cars or doing anything particularly notable. All in all it was a good ride about 55 miles on the mountain bike with somewhere around 2,500 feet of climbing and 150oz of Gatorade.