Altitude Sickness

As the crow flies it's a little under 3.5 miles to the sandy roads of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.  And though it's about 400' higher than here my thought process went something like this: It's been warm here for weeks (several days pushing 60 and most of the rest have been well above freezing and the snow is virtually gone and has been for some time), it's been mostly dry, sand  drains fairly quickly.  What could go wrong?

Well I started to get an inkling as I was climbing those 400'.  But I told myself that this road had been plowed all winter and so had been deep piles of snow in the ditches that had just been slow to melt (this was true but roads down by us had been plowed all winter and the piles of snow had melted  long ago but, darn it, I just wanted to go for a ride and didn't really want to think about just what this snow could mean).  

More indications that weird things, things that I didn't completely understand, were going down.  "Neato," I thought as I stopped for a picture and then blundered on.

By now I had realized that the roads up here had not had the frost go out of them (I'm not a total moron sometimes I just act that way), the top several inches had thawed but below that was still frozen and so things couldn't drain.  I had found that riding down the side of the road - in the leaves - was better but that it sometimes unexpectedly got soft.

In what could be fairly accurately described as doofu-ness, I kept moving forward, farther away from home.  I told myself that there was a chance that the next road could be different.

I was a bit chagrined when I got to the intersection of the next road only to find this:

It might not have been muddy but it was obviously soft and soft = slow, tiring, and frustrating.

At that intersection a sane person would have cut their losses, turned around, and ridden the soggy road back towards home.  For some reason I decided that it didn't look that bad and continued on.  Doofus-ness. But - surprise, surprise - it just kept getting worse:

Most of the time the ice was surprisingly hard and, even though it was quite rotten, made for comparatively firm riding (although since we are comparing it to several inch deep muck that's not saying much).  Suddenly, and with no visibly change in the ice that I could see, you'd break through - which is what happened here.  I broke through, wallowed to a stop and had some soul-searching to do.  I was riding a loop and I was nearing the part of it where it's as far to go back as to keep forward - and, well, I just didn't want to turn around.  I was feeling fine, my hands/wrists didn't hurt (I was trying out some Jones Loop bars and had been off the bike pushing fairly often) it was a beautiful day.  Behind me was known: sloppy, tough, slow riding.  Ahead of me lay a similar distance of unknown (although, in all probability, things weren't going to change).  After a few moments of indecision I kept going.

Not too long after that my heart soared when I saw this:

It's a bit hard to see in the picture but the grey rock is coarser and made for a nice, firm road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My heart sank when not 50 yards later I came to the top of the hill and was greeted by this scene:

All our snow back at home has been gone for several weeks.  It's just a few degrees cooler up here (because of the elevation) but it's amazing what just a few degrees can mean.

Completely dry sand directly next to sand so wet that  it was splashed out as this truck tire track was laid.

Although there are worse ways to spend a gorgeous afternoon than outside doing something you love, I was still happy to get back to firm ground.  It meant more riding and less slogging.  This road had been plowed regularly all winter.

Welcome to Wisconsin in March

In the '09 Arrowhead 135 my total time from start to finish was nearly 40 hours.  Granted a few of those hours were spent resting (I spent about 4 hours at the halfway checkpoint).  All in all I probably spent 35 hours moving myself down the trail.  I say this not to point out how hardcore or tough I am but just to highlight how ridiculous it was for me not to take 35 seconds go just out our door and bring my bike inside where I usually keep it protected from the weather. 

The best part was that I had managed to lean it so that the rear derailleur was directly where the roof dripped.  Some of my gears worked, thankfully the low ones were in service, I had no use for the taller gears anyway for reasons that will become obvious.

Of course a little snow doesn't do any harm to a bike and I brushed off the snow and with no drama I went for a nice bike ride.

It's silly, I know, but something is oddly satisfying about being the first to make tracks.  Except for a few deer I was the first on this stretch of trail.

The next tracks I came across were made by skis.

At this point there had been a minimal amount of snowmobile traffic on the trail.  It was kinda half-assed packed down - where it's hard enough that your tire rides up on top of the snow a bit but since it's not really set hard it slides around at random.  I usually ride up this hill (it's not uncommon for me to have to walk some) and then have fun letting gravity do it's thing on the way down.  But today I rode (and walked some) up this hill but then took a different way down.  Call me a wuss but I'd rather not crash into a barbed wire fence when I lose control on sketchy snow.

This is why I didn't miss my high gears.

As long as I was able to stay on the snowmobile track it was faster.  But the problem was that the track is maybe 15" wide and not set real well and a bit shifty.  So in order to stay on the track you had to constantly concentrate.  Staying on track wasn't that much faster and I like to have the option of looking around a bit.

A Couple Days Later...

  I had been keeping an eye on the forecast: it was supposed to be cold (slightly below zero) warming into the 20's on friday.  40s Saturday and 50s on both Sunday and Monday.  It being March there's a pretty good chance that Friday morning was going to be the last of the below zero weather this winter.  Naturally this got me motivated to hop on my bike (you could replace "naturally" with "as messed up as it may seem" and it would still be more true than less).  
 

Snowbike trails don't get much harder/faster than this.  While I love a tough ride every now and again I must say that conditions like this don't come very often and I appreciate them when they do.  Sure it's been groomed by a big, fossil-fuel-guzzling machine and I wouldn't exactly shed a tear if said machine didn't exist, but cursing rock-hard conditions like this seem similar to cursing a tailwind.  I've paid my dues on the ride a few days before and now I was enjoying effortlessly cruising down the trail in a way that I couldn't if I hadn't done that dues-paying ride.  Good things don't come easy, as they say, and while a fair weather biker could just as easily ride this trail as anyone, or me an easy ride like this is sweeter having done a fairly tough one.  My "good thing" was that I felt good riding the trail.  Not just that I was clever enough the watch the weather and correctly predict the conditions, or that I was rolling at a pretty good clip, or that the sky was blue and the sun was warming me.  All of those were true but it went deeper too.  I've ridden in conditions where none of this was true.  I've paid my dues and I've earned this easy ride - or at least that's the way I feel about it.   I'm glad they aren't all this easy, I couldn't enjoy the easy ones in the same way.  

  

A couple days later...

We had some snow here (maybe ankle-deep) and then we had an uncharacteristically long January thaw (it was over a week long) and we lost most of our snow.  It got below freezing again and we got some more snow but in mid February we had a warm snap (again about a week long, a few days were in the 50's) and we lost most of it again.  Then we got the snow that started out this post.  Now it's warm again but, according to the forecast, colder weather is coming tomorrow.  Now that it's March you kind of expect intermittent freeze/thaw cycles - but the ones we had in January and February were pretty weird.

I was having a hankering for hot cocoa yesterday and so went out for a ride.  When I was pulling the stove out of it's stuff sack I realized that I had forgotten the petroleum jelly-soaked cotton balls that I usually use to start the fire.  I had taken them out the other day for something else and forgot to put them back.  So I cut a piece of birchbark:

...and used my knife to scrape it up until I got a little pile of scrapings:

And then lit it using a ferro rod.  Please forgive that I didn't get pictures of the actual lighting as I had to work fast to get the little fire into the stove before it went out.

I had the fire laid and ready to go in the wood stove before I lit the birchbark scrapings.

 And that's it.  It was almost 50 (high in the mid 20's in the forecast) and it was nice to get out.

A couple days later... 

Years ago I made a  set of poorman's studded tires using screws I got at the hardware store.  Took the tire off the rim and screwed them out through the tire.  Simple right?  Well it took a surprising amount of time to get a functional set of tires.  Didn't cost me much, which was the main reason I took this route, but damn, by the end I wanted to pull my hair out.

This ice was unusually slick.  That sounds weird...let me explain: most of the time - especially
when it's cold - letting air out of your regular rubber tires adds a surprising amount of grip on ice.
But not always - I've ridden in icy conditions for the past several years and didn't need studs
but it would have been nearly impossible today. 

But they work.  I haven't used them in years - but I pulled them out and put them on my 29+ rims and voila! I could ride on stuff like this:

And this:

It wasn't too far below freezing and so while the ice didn't do much melting the exposed ground slurped up the warmth from the sun and melted in spots and made for unique riding conditions.

 And sometimes it was so slippery I didn't want to stray from my bike (I don't have studded boots).

Wintergreen!

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