False Horizons

I guess it's time to write another blog post, now that the holidays are done and the new year is here.

Personally, I'm not too excited about the new year.  The best thing about it is that it means that 2016 is finally over. It was not a banner year for me, and I'm glad to see it go.  But the course ahead looks grim, and the prospect of watching the country go down in flames over the next four years really depresses me.  So I've made a decision to have a personal boycott of all news media until January 2021 - everything may suck, but I won't know about it.  As a part of this effort I'm no longer visiting Facebook - not because I believe that it's inherently bad, but because I don't want to see the news or all the ugly things that ignorant, evil people believe. I have been sharing items to the bicycling page I made for our area on occasion but I'm no longer actually visiting my page.  This is for my own piece of mind - if it bothers you, kindly keep it to yourself.

Since I last posted in October the fall riding season has long since come to an end.  But late fall might be my favorite time of the year, and I took advantage of every bit of good weather to get outside. There was a great camping trip with Diana at Kelly Pines in the Allegheny National Forest, quite a bit of trail work, and of course lots of bike riding. That includes some great mountain bike rides as well as plenty of pavement miles.  I made several trips down to Beaver Creek State Park to ride the trails down there, including the still to be finished new trail above Salamander Trail. I think that Beaver Creek might have the most mountain bike suitable terrain in Ohio, and the new trail takes advantage of it to the fullest extents.  The riding can be very technical, but I love that stuff and really enjoy getting out on Dogwood, Salamander, and the new trail.

Of course I also got in plenty of fall rides at West Branch, the park that's just 25 miles down the road.  Much of that was night riding, which doesn't really make for great photos but is still a lot of fun.  I just checked back on my MapMyRide ride log, and it looks like the only other singletrack that I rode in the fall was at North Road Nature Preserve, where I had a whole bunch of short, after work rides.

Apparently I never get tired of taking pictures of the West Branch skinnies.

Freshly raked trails at North Road Nature Preserve

Speaking of North Park Nature Preserve, I've finally finished the trail project that I committed to four long years ago.  So the last of the three trails, the one that took twice as long as the others, is finally finished.  The first two trails, Red Trail and Blue Trail, mostly went through a semi-mature forest where clearing the trail corridor and building the tread was easy.  This last one, Yellow Trail, has about half it's distance in a mature forest, with the remainder located in dense scrub.  The forest part of the trail was easy enough, but clearing and building trail through the scrub was incredibly difficult.  Just clearing a corridor was very tough, and since the trail wasn't finished and not getting any user traffic, it was a constant battle to maintain the already built trail.  And the ground in the scrubby section was an unbelievable mess of wet spots and pot holes, so that making a tread required several rock armoring and infill sections.

And then there was the wet spot - a short section of very dense scrub that tends to hold water way longer than anywhere else we built.  Because of the restraints of the property we had to build at least some trail in this wet area, or not build the loop at all.  Thinking that the only solution was going to be to build over 100' of turnpiking, we put this section off for last.  But with volunteer hours dropping off I was faced with the prospect of singlehandedly bringing back several tons of fill gravel with our trail wagon - something that would have likely taken me another year to do.  So I was very happy when Trumbull Metroparks agreed to give us enough money to build a 120' long boardwalk across this problem area.  I started construction in August, and finally finished in October.  Most of the construction and material hauling I did myself, but there were a few kind souls who pitched in for a work session or two.

The boardwalk with newly finished transition.

Stopping to cut out a downed tree while hauling more lumber back to the build site.

I'm very glad to have this project done, since it already has taken longer than I thought it would, and I'd like to get involved with some trail building at other parks.  But after finishing off the two loops and one out'n'back trail I started to wonder if there was a way to make that out'n'back into a loop.  Long story short - this winter I'm working on adding another 1/3 mile of trail through mature woods to make Blue Trail into a loop.  Next year I'd like to work on adding some mtb specific features to the trails, but I haven't committed to that yet.

New trail will run through the trees on the creek bank.

During the summer I had decided that I was spending too much time riding on the rail trails, and not enough riding my mountain bike in the woods.  So I started riding more mtb miles, but I still managed to get in quite a bit of different rail trail rides.  Of course I did the local trails - Western Reserve Greenway & Little Beaver Creek Greenway - but I also managed to hit a couple that I don't get to that much.  One trip on the Maple Highlands Trail had an unfortunate incident where I managed to crash on pavement in dry, clear weather.  I managed to ride through a small moist spot on the trail, which was slippery as owl snot and hit the pavement hard.  I was lucky I had my helmet on, because I banged my head off the pavement way harder than I really wanted to.

I also managed to put a large hole in my elbow, which is still not healed 6 weeks later.

I made a Thanksgiving day ride on part of the Ohio & Erie Towpath Trail, doing some volunteer work for the Industrial Heartland Trail Coalition by checking one of the 'trail itineraries' that they are developing.  It turned out to be an interesting ride, with almost no one on the trail, rain most of the way - and a nice layer of crushed limestone trail surface spread evenly over me and my bike.

Covered with grit.

I also made a couple of snow rides in the cold periods of December & January, evenly split between mountain biking and pavement riding.  Keeping my schedule of riding 3 or 4 days a week was pretty nice, and I managed to hit my 2000 mile goal for 2016 by finishing with 2100 miles. Not sure how many miles I'll try for this year. I'll get in as many as I can during the winter, and then see how the numbers shape up when the weather starts to break.  

Near the end of the year I took a look at some of the video that I'd take while out riding, and put together a short video of my riding year in review (though there are some clips included from before 2016).  I did the same thing last year, and was happy with the result, but this year the song I found to be the soundtrack really added a lot.  This year's review turned out even better than last years, if I may say so myself!

Here's hoping that your trails are dry, the wind is at your back, and the hills are few.

The Grind

It's been a while since I posted anything here - since November in fact. I believe that's the longest gap since I started the blog. But in my defense, there just hasn't been a lot of fun stuff to write about lately.

The holidays are through, and that's a good thing. I'm not a big holiday type person, and I'm glad when the blatant commercialism and worship of well-packaged crap is over for another year. We had a typical Christmas, even though it's harder to make it happen as Kenny gets older and leaves childhood behind. Still, he was more or less happy with what he got and I guess that's enough.

The main thing on my mind lately has been winter. This won't be news to anyone who lives nearby, but this winter has been unusually tough. We've had wintry weather since the end of November, with a colder than normal December and January. The mid-winter thaw that has been such a wonderful reset the last several years just didn't happen this year. We've had just about constant snow cover, and way more than normal days with temperatures below zero. Usually I pride myself in being able to deal with winter and still do the things that I enjoy, but when the thermometer gets down to single digits or below I really have very little desire to be outside.

Between the snow and the frost heave (also known as 'needle ice') on the trails there hasn't been very much mountain biking this winter. I've managed a couple of trips out to West Branch, but the trail conditions each time were less than ideal. With winter riding you expect it to be way harder, so it was still worth the trip - but its not something that I want to do that often. I've also headed over to the nearby North Road Nature Preserve to ride a couple of times in the last two months. These are the mountain bike trails in town that I've been working on building for the last three years. We're a small group of volunteers, so it's taken us that long to build three miles of trails. They're basically beginner type trails, with no real hills, and very few rocks or roots. But they're only a couple of miles from the house, and by riding a complete circuit in either direction I can get an hour of riding in the woods - and that is a good thing.



Beside Mosquito Creek on the North Road Nature Preserve trails.

I've tried to take advantage of the rail trails this winter too.  I've done a few rides on the Western Reserve Greenway - until I overestimated my skills and underestimated the ice cover, which resulted in the hardest crash I've had in a couple of years.  It's been over a month and the road rash is still healing.  I also got in a couple of rides on the Little Beaver Creek Greenway, which has to be one of the best around.  So far this winter I caught it with just a little snow, with a lot of snow, and in the middle of a blizzard.  But the trail is great, with curves and mild hills, where many of our NE Ohio rail trails are flat and straight.  And the scenery along the Middle Fork of Little Beaver Creek is hard to beat.

The Teegarden Bridge alongside Little Beaver Creek Greenway.

And just to show how far this winter weather has pushed me - I've been out riding on the roads several times.  Usually I don't like to do road rides - as a million mile plus driver I've seen way too many idiots at the wheel to place my trust in a random motorists talents.  But with singletrack unrideable, and the rail trails covered with snow packed down by illegal snowmobilers (and boy does that make me mad), the only choice remaining has been on the roads.  I do realize that I'm lucky to live in an area that has easy access to sparsely travelled back roads - seeing a car every ten minutes is about the average up there.  But I now ride with a rearview mirror and almost always stop when I see a car approaching from behind to make sure I'm not about to become another statistic  (go to crazyguyonabike.com and check out the "Sweet Rolls" tour journal for a sad story about this - and take a minute to leave some words of encouragement in their guest book too).  But it can be a lot of fun on the back roads in Amish country.

Gravel road riding between snows in southern Ashtabula County.

Riding through the old farm country can be very pleasant.  The terrain is mostly flat, and since I ride my mountain bike the road surfaces are always good enough.  As I spend more time on these back roads I'm picking out the best spots for to string together to get a nice road loop that I can access from the rail trail once the snow melts.

Old fashioned quality building.

The trick is finding the balance between traffic and snow cover.  Too little traffic and the snow doesn't get worn down, too much traffic and it's not safe.  So sometimes I choose the lesser of two evils, and ride on roads that are maybe a bit more snowy than I'd like.

Snowy, but not quite TOO snowy.

So I endure, just like everyone else.  The days are getting longer at over 2-1/2 minutes of added daylight each day.  Spring approaches - eventually.  I wait for the weekends, when I have time to ride in the daytime, and hope that the weather will at least minimally cooperate.

In non-bicycling related news, there have been a couple of developments.  For one, the firm that I work for has gotten two big jobs in the last couple of months.  When the recession hit the competition in our field got pretty fierce for the few remaining jobs, and we've gone over five years between big commissions.  But we recently won the contract on the biggest building we've ever done, and another big job not long after that (and another one that looks very promising coming up).  So that means some of the pressure is off about paying the bills etc.  I'm very thankful to the partners in the firm that we managed to stick it out through the lean times, and keep on pushing ahead towards recovery.

Another interesting happening is that I was appointed to the Trumbull County Metroparks board.  One of the retiring board members, familiar with me through my work on the North Park trails, nominated me for the post, and in December I was sworn in.  I have no illusions about the job - things happen slowly, and progress has to be planned carefully.  But I think that we have an amazing county park system for the population we have, and am excited to be able to be a small part of continuing the improvements that we've seen in the last ten years.

With the calendar heading towards spring, and the inevitable return of warm weather, I'll probably be way more likely to get out and ride.  Which means that I won't be likely to go another two months between posts.