Every other person you see is wearing spandex.
It’s OK to have a Hummer
The grocery store dedicates a whole aisle to energy bars.
Category: Travel
-
1 to 21
All in one day we went from a rainy morning to 1° with snow at 11,000 ft to 21° and a sunny afternoon to sitting around a camp fire in t-shirts at 9pm. What a day!
We’ve crossed the Rockies, seen the Colorado National Monument and driven Scenic Route 128 along the Colorado River into Moab Utah. The scenery has been breath taking.
The most common phrase heard today was “Oh My!” followed by “Look at that!”.
Sleeping under the stars tonight.
-
Posting frequency
Not that my blog posts have any frequency or pattern at the best of times but, for the next week or two I might be a little more frequent as we’re on a road trip in the south western USA.
The order might be a little jumbled as well as the upload is dependent on sporadic wi-fi availability. Hey, our campground doesn’t even have running water, unless you count the Colorado River.
-
Bicycle Lanes – Blessing or a Curse?
Bike lanes have been showing up around Winnipeg, especially the downtown area over the last couple of year. Until recently, even though a couple of these lanes have been on my normal commuting route, I’ve not given them too much thought. Nice to have, but I was a little indifferent.Then the city created a dedicates lane on Assiniboine Ave. which caused a lot of controversy and in my opinion was a waste of money. Assiniboine was a low traffic street in the first place and bicycling on it was no problem.
Then one day a few weeks ago a bike lane shows up on St. Mary Ave.! Initially, this seems like a great thing, in fact just the day before I rode up the middle of two lanes of traffic and thought to my self “that was a little crazy”. And then there it was, my own dedicated lane, and for a day or two things were good.
Then things changed. St Mary has parking in the curb lane before 9am and lots of drivers cruise up the curb lane, encounter a parked car, and lane change with no regard to the bike lane or the bicyclist in the lane, that would be me! To top it off they frequently rounded the parked cars and then crossed over the bike lane again with no regard for the cyclist, to make a right hand turn onto a one way street.
I don’t think that bike lanes really help the cyclist all that much and I’d just as soon not have the false sense of security. Cycling on the road with cars, it’s always be ready for the unexpected.
-
Return to MDH
It is looking like there will be a second trip to do some mountain biking on the MDH trail in 2010! A tentative date of Sept 18-19 has been suggested and this also might be the largest group ever. I hope the Ranch is up for this.
Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
-
MDH2010 – Day 2
It’s early. Some are still trying to sleep. But the keeners in the room next door are up and revving up the bikes in the parking lot. I think they slept in their cycling gear. As the ranch is not fully open for the season yet, there is nobody in the restaurant so breakfast is a combination of bars, fruit and miscellaneous snack food left over from yesterday, a truly healthy way to start the day.
With everybody roused out of bed, bikes checked, water loaded we’re off, heading north on the Buffalo Gap Trail. Our goal, to see how close we can get to where the BGT intersects the MDH. A couple of miles down the trail, I’m having mechanical problems with my bike. After a consult with Daniel, our senior bike mechanic on the trip, he diagnosis it as a chain link that is damaged and sticking. After a quick repair were once again roaring down the trail.
It seems rather quickly we’ve crossed the creek that marked our farthest distance on the Sunday 2009 trip and it seems lake a good time to stop for a mid-morning snack. We power on after the break and enjoy the new scenery and are having great fun on the trail. Well, I am any way. I couple of guys are feeling the pain that was inflicted yesterday and are taking a more “relaxed” approach to the day. If you look very closely at this picture you can see them while some of us are further up the trail. We need to get on the road back to Winnipeg so we’re watching our ride time and have planned a 2 hours out, and 2 hours back, but we stretched that a bit because everybody kept on saying “lets just go over there to that next marker”.
Eventually, we call it quits and turn around an head back to the Ranch. Doug is off trying to catch Josh and Elijah who have at least a 3-4 mile head start, Danial and Scott set a fast and steady pace, and Eric and I enjoy the ride back together stopping to take pictures and enjoy the scenery and a beautiful afternoon. At one point on the ride back I had a very clear and special thought as I watched the riders ahead, that this is “the best of days”. I hope to hold on to that memory for a very long time.
Back at the ranch, so to speak, we shower up, pack up, and enjoy another round of steak dinners while discussing the days ride. In another 9 hours more or less with a few stops for gas and food, where back in Winnipeg. I think everybody is looking forward to possible the first ever 2nd trip to the MDH and the same year this fall. In fact, we may have booked that ranch already.
-
On the Long X Trail
We’re about 1 1/2 hours into an almost 8 hour “character building” ordeal when we stopped for a photo op after a long muddy climb of about 500 vertical feet. It’s rained Friday night and we’re out on a spur trail off the Maah Daah Hey trail in North Dakota called the Long X Trail. We knew the trail would be difficult if not impossible when wet, but some how we just kept on thinking it would dry up and get better. It didn’t.
After we rode on far enough to start thinking things would never get better, we were too far gone to bother turning back, so we kept on ridding and it kept on getting muddier, slipperier, and then it started to rain. Parts of the trail were so rough that not only did you have to walk the trail, you needed to carry your bike. If you didn’t the tires just picked up so much mud that they refused to turn. Everyone spent a significant amount of time just scraping the clay muck off your bike so you could resume riding for what ever distance was possible before the bike was once again coated in mud. At one point we even resorted to washing the bikes in a cattle watering trough to get free from the mud.
Everyone made the full days ride of approximately 20km which I’m sure was actually longer because the cycling computer didn’t register the mileage while I was carrying the bike, and there was a lot of carrying going on. Once back at the CCC campground everyone washed up and changed before driving down to the Buffalo Gap Guest Ranch where we washed the bikes and enjoyed a BBQ pork & beans dinner.
The Sunday ride was much better. More on that later.
-
Return to Maah Daah Hey
In just under a week I’ll be heading off to ride the MDH trail in North Dakota with the boys. For many years we made an annual trip to ride this outstanding single track trail, but this will be the first time since 2005.
I’ve been taking with some of the guys and everybody is getting pretty excited about the trip. Its quite the action packed weekend with a 9 hour drive thru the night, breakfast at 4am, a brief nap in the vehicles until the sun comes up and then all day riding!
I think we’ll be riding the northern section and taking in some near by trails on Saturday. Sunday we’ll ride for half a day in the Buffalo Gap area. As some would say, it should be GTs. I’m looking forward to it. -
Speed Trip
Friday night we picked up a U Haul trailer and loaded up a king size bed and some other stuff for a quick delivery trip to the lake. Strangely, the U-Haul folks we not to willing to rent the trailer for two days, so we compressed the trip down to 24 hours of extreme trailering.
By the time we were ready to go it was 8pm. After picking up some dinner at A&W where their lightning fast service didn’t exactly help us get underway any faster. The drive down was a little sketchy from time to time as it was snowing and the temperature was around -1° so there was some snow in the passing lane and a little ice from time to time. It had to be a little bad because we came up behind several different semi-trailers that were doing 60kph. Oh yeah, and then there was the big buck that crossed the highway right in front of us. No biggie, he made it and so did we.
After arriving we lit a fire in the fireplace and huddled under a blanket while watching a couple of episodes of House. The next morning it was quite white outside. Winter has arrived and only a few short days ago it was much warmer.
Towing the trailer really put a hit on the gas mileage but on the way home we tanked up a .884/l the lowest price in many many months.
After breakfast we unloaded the new king size bed and loaded up two ancient singles destined for the dump later in the day. Then we quickly tidied up the cottage, antifreeze the plumbing and hit the road again as we needed to get the trailer back by 6pm. After a quick stop for gas in Falcon and again at Prawda (did I mention pulling the trailer is hard on gas?) we’re back in Winnipeg picking up some stuff from the house for a trip to the dump. After the dump, Windsor Plywood to pick up some 14′ baseboards, bending them to fit in the trailer. That’s right after 8 years, we’re getting baseboards. Drop the baseboards off at home, drop some stuff off at Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and drop the trailer back at U-Haul. Phey, having the trailer off the truck is quite a relief. Then back home for a quiet night. That’s enought driving for one day.
-
The Mt Temple Hike
We’re safe and sound back at the hotel packing up for the trip back to Winnipeg but the hike yesterday was an adventure of a life time. While I didn’t make it to the summit by choice, it was still an amazing day as I climbed to about 10,000 vertical feet from a start in about 5,000. We experienced a great climb up the trail, some very scary scrambling up some very steep loose rock, a 20′ vertical climb without ropes, touched snow in August, watched a helicopter rescuce, sat out a rain and hail storm at 10,000, belayed down a 40′ vertical face assisted by Brian, a mountain rescue worker, and the group who made the summit were walking around in an electrically charged cloud getting shocked and dumping all their metal gear like ice axes and trekking poles and everybody hiked out for several hours in a very close thunderstorm getting quite soaked. Other that that it was a rather uneventful day.
It was quite a crazy experience with a lot of exciting memories and lessons learned. More later with photos of the rescue and some great scenic shots of the mountains and our group.
