Trails

Andrea

Wrapping up the trip

Sorry for the lack of updates, but the last few days have been somewhat mundane. Not a lot of action, but some pretty nice photos…

From the Downtown Marquette shoreline-

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Those were actually from the day before Ore to Shore. The Sunday after the race, we checked out some of the South Marquette trail system, which included some great scenery and some dilapidated downhill runs on the local ski hill.

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Later on that day, we made the drive down to Midland. We’ve ridden local trails the past couple of days. This area is really, really flat, and the trails are really, really twisty. A lot of people say that the Stanky Creek trails are the narrowest, twistiest they’ve ever ridden. The trails in Midland make Stank look like a hotdog down a hallway. No photos of those, so here’s a Tridge instead.

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We’re finally getting back on the road back to Memphis tomorrow, where I’ll re-pack my bags and head down to Dahlonega, GA for Fool’s Gold. The Wizard says to do the 50 miler, which, honestly, after all of the racing & traveling I’ve done lately, is a nice thing to hear. For now, I’m just really, really ready to be home. Even if it is just for one night.

Andrea

Michigan Tech Trails

We left Copper Harbor on Thursday to head to Marquette. Along the way, we stopped at Michigan Tech (Ryan’s Alma Mater) to check out the trails. For those of you that aren’t “in the know” about Michigan Tech (fear not- I’m not sure if I’d even heard of it until I met Ryan), its specialty is engineering.

So, what do you get when you mix engineering and trail building?

Ramp-to-drop (I rode it! Ryan got video, but I still have to figure out how to get it on here)

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The long log ride (also rode that one a couple of times)

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Then there were some that we just kind of looked at in awe…

The Sine Wave:

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And, my personal favorite- The Dorkscrew:

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After the section of trail with all of the cool stuff, there was another loop called the Hairy Toad loop. While it didn’t feature anything man-made, it was my absolute most favorite type of trail- rocky, rooty, and twisty. I call it ADD trail. I rode all of it except for a sizable rock garden that was wet and slimy. It looked like a swellbow waiting to happen.

On the way out, we found the pump track, which rode as if it had also been engineered over a few pints of beer. The berms on the downhill turns were the most perfectly angled piles of dirt you could possibly imagine. Scary fast, and really awesome.

I need to build some baby stuff in my back yard to keep practicing my skinny-stuff riding skills. As it stands, I’m too much of a chicken.

Andrea

Copper Harbor Trails

Wednesday morning when we woke up, we weren’t sure if our ride would be rained out or not. We figured we’d get out and ride as much of the IMBA’s “Epic” loop that we could before it moved in.

What a great trail! It heads straight out from the middle of the town of Copper Harbor and winds around the ridges behind it. They generally aren’t too technical until you get to the ones labeled as “black diamond” trails. The Red trail baits you in to hauling ass before suddenly dumping you down a rocky, off-camber steep thing with a tree growing in the middle. We quickly figured out to expect anything around each corner…

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It wasn’t JUST a bridge, it was a nearly vertical drop followed by a bridge (photo really doesn’t do it justice)…

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They really love the plank bridges out here. So do I…

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We ended up cutting our ride a little short in order to preserve our legs for the Ore to Shore race this weekend. After a little lunch and rest, we decided to drive around and visit the Delaware Mine (AKA the “safety last” tour). Mines are pretty cool…

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Andrea

The End of Michigan

Sort of, at least.

Yesterday when we got settled in at Copper Harbor, we decided to head out on some of the easier trails in the local trail system. However, I got sidetracked in thinking that maybe we could find the end of the Keweenaw out in Lake Superior. We passed a sign for the beginning of US Highway 41, but the road turned to gravel and kept going into the forest. Of course, I wanted to see where it went and what was at the end of it. It HAD to have an end, right?

Fast forward to half an hour and 600 feet of climbing later. We hadn’t found anything other than some nice forest roads. We figured we should turn back so we could get back to town before dark, so Ryan came up with a loop back based on his Garmin’s map. Though we ended up on at least one pretty sketchy section of “road,” we ended up having a great ride, and made it back in time to get to the last restaurant open before the town rolled up their sidewalks from the evening.

Photos…

Oh yeah, and, as you can see, I’m experimenting a bit with self-portrait type photos. Our motel also provides its guests with afro picks.

Andrea

Summertime Syllamo Trail Conditions

I’m very sad to type this right now, but I found out yesterday (the hard way, of course) that there are frequent sections of overgrowth on my favorite trails. Violent, thorny, skin-ripping overgrowth. I left Memphis yesterday in hopes to go for a short ride on the Red trail then head out for a longer blue/orange ride this morning. However, once I was on the trail, my hopes for fun rides quickly faded into visions of blood and spiders.

Well, I’d say that about 90% of the trail was OK. It was a little bushy, but as long as you watched out for new deadfall and rocks, you’d be OK…

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However, the bad, overgrown parts were really bad…

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I managed about 7 miles of the loop before I said “eff it” and took a bail-out trail back to Green Mountain road. I was bleeding from my elbows and knees, and (despite saturating myself with bugsray) wondered how many spiders, ticks, and chiggers were invading my skin. It sucked.

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BTW- those little brown dots are bugs of some sort. Chiggers? Ticks? I have no idea. I hosed them with bug spray so they’d stay put in the time before I got into the shower. I was pretty disappointed in the whole thing.

After getting back to the cabin & cleaning up, I headed back down to Anglers for some catfish, then made it back to the cabin just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset, which made things a little better…

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Andrea

Day 22- Bagging a 14er

So, back on Monday when I was sitting around with the hikers, John mentioned that he was going on an epic hike to collect a string of 14ers along the Colorado Trail. I said I’d never climbed one before, and he invited me to hike one with him. Um, Hell yeah!

I see you all shaking your heads- yes, I know that I’m racing Saturday, but chances like this don’t come along every day…

We decided that the perfect one would be Elbert- it’s the shortest hike from the trailhead, and it’s also the tallest of the Colorado 14ers. The hike up was gorgeous- especially once we were above the treeline. I was amazed at the wildlife up there- grouses (which you can barely see in the photos because of their camouflage), chipmunks (you can see his butt in the photo), crows, and, at the top- Marmots! One of the Marmots almost crawled into my lap- which was probably the most frightening experience of the day. I didn’t want to catch marmot fever or anything…

Once we were up there, we signed the register and celebrated with a drink. There were a lot of people up there, so we sat around and talked to everyone for a few hours.

Eventually, we started to get hungry and sunburned. We headed back down- a process that is harder on the muscles than the climb up (I’m a little sore today!). I dropped John and his pack off at the Mt. Massive trailhead so he could take advantage of the perfect weather and make a sunset summit then headed back to the hostel for the most awesome dinner I’ve had on this trip.

Andrea

Training Camp ’09- Days 5 and 6

Yes, this is a combo post- yesterday I rode, packed, and skeedadled out of Mountain View so I could get back home to Memphis before bedtime, and had a bunch of stuff to do once I got home, so I didn’t feel like updating.

The sunrise/blue moonset was a really nice way to start the day:

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The ride was just a simple loop in the National Forest. I started out at Blanchard Springs on my MTB and headed up the mountain to Green Mountain Road. From there, I rode up a while then dropped back in to Gunnar Pool . It’s a gorgeous campground with a small lake, dam, and waterfall, but I didn’t hang around for photos because it was pretty dang cold. You’ll just have to take my word for it ;)

From there, I turned around & climbed back up to Green Mountain, tracked east, then headed south on Sandy Flat, which drops down quickly to a creek crossing then climbs again back to Green Mountain road. The entire loop was less than 30 miles and took about 2.5 hours. Each of the 3 climbs was between 500 and 600 ft of elevation gain, and I rode the rolling sections between climbs at a decent tempo, so I was happy to get back to the decent back to Blanchard.

Once I was back, I figured I’d take some photos of Sylamore Creek…

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Today, Ryan and I day-tripped the Columbia #1 cyclocross race. It was cold and reletively uneventful. Kim Bishop showed up and gave me a run for my money. My legs were wondering WTF I was doing. Not only did I put in nearly 20 hours worth of riding/hiking this week (my TSB is -38 right now for all you Training Peaks geeks), I haven’t done any CX-type efforts since the Outdoors race several weeks ago. Needless to say, I wasn’t really thinking about the usual cat 3 boy-beatdown that I liked to administer earlier in the season.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even colder, so we’ll probably venture out to the WRT for a couple of hours on the mountain bikes.

Random thought of the evening: Barleywine tastes like neither barley nor wine. Discuss.

Andrea

Training Camp- Day 3

Last night, even though the radar showed solid blue for several hours, this is what I woke up to this morning…

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I figured I’d take today to head out on the Bald Scrappy Loop (orange trail) and start working on the 4.5 mile section that I adopted (and hike the remaining 3 miles following that). The hardest part of adopting a section of trail is maintaining the corridor- a 3 foot perimeter around the singletrack. It involves cutting any small trees, overhanging branches, and underbrush. It was obvious that most of the trail hadn’t had such care in a while. So, I slowly made my way down the trail with a handsaw, stopping to cut something back or off every 10-50 feet. It took me 4.5 hours (giving me a total hiking time just short of 6 hours).

The inherent nature of trail clearing is both destructive and preservative at the same time. There’s also the beauty and solitude of the woods… it’s very zen-like.

Along the way, I took some photos of the icicles & whatnot…

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My favorite part of the trail is the section along the top of Cedar Scrappy Mountain:

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I dolled up Turbo’s already fabulous collar so that she’d look a little less like a deer or rhinestone-wearing coyote. She’s a wonderful trail companion- most of the time, she trots along a couple of steps behind me. I enjoy the company…

Turbo

Andrea

Training Camp ’09- Day 2

I set out today with the intention to ride a majority of the Syllamo’s Revenge course. I started out by leaving the trailhead and heading up Green Mountain to find Blanchard Road. After taking a couple of wrong turns onto logging roads, I finally got going in the right direction. I wanted to get a feel for the race start, so I actually rode past the yellow trail intersection to the Blanchard campground, turned around, and headed back up the ~3/4 mile climb. This essentially dumps you into the most rocky, technical section of the Jack’s Branch trail. I quickly realized that the ground under the rocks was still wet, which made the rock gardens much more treacherous than usual, because they were either slippery or would shift and slide as I rode over them. The sun-sheltered spots were icy. A couple of times, I fell downhill off of the trail and was only saved by grabbing on to nearby trees.

So, in the interest of NOT falling down a mountain, I changed my plan to ride the remainder of the yellow trail and the red trail. The red trail was full of wildlife- I had a herd of wild hogs run across the trail in front of me, almost ran over a squirrel, scared up a huge gang of turkeys, then finished it all off with some random whitetail deer. The awesome part of the ride is the fact that I felt as strong at mile 30 as I did at mile 3. Looks like this base training stuff is paying off!

Some photos from a scenic spot on the yellow…

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It’s kinda weird to think that exactly a year ago, I was at the Metro training camp learning how to give Coryn Rivera a sprint leadout. Now I’m riding my MTB in preparation to hit the NUE series with guns blazing. I’m not surprised, though.

Andrea

It’s not a habit, I swear…

So… if you’ve been reading a while, you may remember this post back in April where I’d broken a derailleur hanger and cage exactly 1 week after getting the Jet9.

Well, today I managed to snap another hanger. The rear plate of the DR cage is bent in one spot, but I’m pretty confident that I can fix it. Ryan and I were almost 2 miles into the Bald Scrappy loop when a stick popped up and momentarily lodged back there. I heard it and stopped pedaling immediately, but the damage was already done…

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I had chain repair stuff with me, so I removed the DR and attempted to convert to single speed…

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However, even trying a few different combinations of chain length/gearing, the chain was always really loose or waaaaay too tight, so I ended up removing it and doing the walk of (mechanical) shame back to the car… which is a lot like writing “I will always bring a spare hanger” 1000x on the chalkboard during detention.

Ryan decided to finish the remaining 5.5 miles of the loop. I got back to the car, loaded up my disabled bike, and hiked up the other end of the trail about a 1/4 of a mile until I found a good spot to stop and wait for a photo opportunity.

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Afterward, we went back to the cabin, changed, and headed back over to the trailhead to hike the White River Bluff trail (shortest & most scenic of the trail system). While we were out, we did a nice bit of trail clearing. We moved several low-hanging widowmakers as well as some large fallen branches and countless “spoke killer” sticks from the track. The last part of the loop (or first, if you’re going clockwise) features a gorgeous view from the bluffs high above the White River (hence the name of the trail) Oh yeah… and see the speck of a house near the top of the mountain just under where that branch is pointing down at the top of the photo? That’s the cabin! It’s freakin’ sweet!

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Tomorrow Ryan is going to ride some more, and I’m going to hike/clear the Bald Scrappy loop much like I did to the White River Bluff loop today. Afterward, we’re going to head back to Memphis and ride on the road Sunday morning before the rain moves in.