This is Peter's latest epic ride with teammate and friend Bryan Curry ( Chicken Curry). Fun reading! ~Laural
Team,
I'm going to try to put together more ride and race reports, and here's an attempt at one:
Chicken Curry and myself loaded up the truck with bikes and headed out beyond Estacada to the time trial course that most of you know. The idea was to scout out some more interesting gravel road loops out in the country. Here was the plan, carefully crafted on a GPS mapping utility:
That yellow line is Hwy 224, which eventually winds its way out to Timothy Lake. The leftmost violet line is Forest Road 54.
We started out in a mixture of light rain and ice pellets. The first real winter-like weather we've ridden in for a while, but not too bad. When we got to the beginning of the planned course the pavement was unbelievably good:
I was having a little trouble with the GPS computer that was supposed to be showing us where to go... I think I garbled the data somehow in the transfer. The computer thought we were riding the course in the other direction. I thought we were still okay just following the line on the little electronic map, but I was wrong, and we ended up doing a nasty climb off course for a while. We rolled back down the hill and got on what we thought was the right course. Next, the unbelievably good pavement gave way to this:
I think you would have to be excessively charitable to label this as a road on a map. To make matters worse, it seemed to be made up of fist-sized rocks for long stretches. On the theory that it might be just a short ugly connection to more real roadway we forged onwards. We were wrong, but here's a map of how it turned out:
As you can see from the careful diagram, we did see a deer hunter along the way, fortunately we have bright team kit, and he was kind enough not to laugh at us.
How we didn't pinch-flat is beyond me, but we did eventually reach a point where a stream had helpfully completely washed out this sorry excuse for a road.
So we turned back, scraped the mud out of our cleats, and rode out further on 224. The weather had turned out nice, and we saw scenery like this:
Turned out to be epic in a totally different and unexpected way. Hoping to ride out further in this direction sometime before things are snowed in. At the furthest point in our ride we found a promising climb on Pipeline Road, has anyone ridden this?
So, that's the tale of our pre-base mile ride / hike, thanks for reading.
Peter
