Mini Epic Ride

"Mini Epic," I guess that's an oxymoron. That's fitting after today's ride. I feel a bit like a moron.

I was finally able to do the Mica Peak climb I was hoping to do a couple Fridays ago. I had the rare occurrence of having a crummy ride. There were lots of contributing factors.

The biggest reason was that I ran out of water way too early and pushed it too far without water. I was about 3/4 up the hill when I ran out of water. But I was so close. I knew there wouldn't be water at the top -- yet I kept going. Dumb.

My knee has been bugging me a bit lately. Normally I stand on long climbs like this and just take it slow, but there was an inch or so of loose gravel and the grade was crazy steep. So I couldn't engage the rear wheel unless I sat down. My RB-T is not geared for spinning up climbs. For rock stars it would be fine: 30/28; but for me that's grinding. So my knee paid for that -- not having gobs of water didn't help the knee either I assume. So that was stupid too.

After I got to the top I took a quick walk around the buildings to see if I'd get lucky and find a water tap. No luck.

As I bombed down the other side, which was really an old road: bigger than a trail, but narrower than a road, my camera popped out of my handlebar bag. It popped out because I didn't close the pocket it was in. Of course I didn't see it. This required an hour of back tracking UP the hill again... only to find it about 100 feet from where I had started to back track. By this time I was beginning to feel a bit lightheaded for lack of water. Lame.

I finally ran across some water trickling down the side of a hill. I drank two bottles worth w/out treating it. (Sounds lame, but I trust water that comes out of the side of a hill, especially if there's no grazing up above. But we'll see, maybe my next blog post will be about how I stayed up puking all night.)

I got off course and a bit lost for while. I only packed a GPS. I didn't even bring my Spokane County map. If I had a good map, I would enjoyed the ride down the hill after finding water. Instead, I had to rely on my GPS, which is OK, but not enough. You need the context provided by a map. I got lost for about an hour as the trail got narrower, rockier, and steeper. There were also a lot of fallen trees across the path. Sucky.

By the time I popped out on a logging road that appeared to have been traveled in the last 10 years, it was 3pm. I had company coming at 5. The road finally led me out of the woods and to Highway 27. I hammered on the Palouse. By the time I got to the climb to Baltimore, I was pretty shot. At that point, some racer dude passed me and said, "Good job!" That is a damn condescending thing to say to someone when you pass them.

I was home by 4:30.

Here's the GPS output:

Lies. Mica Peak is not 5000 feet. I think it's about 4600. But all the same. The climb is pretty severe and packed into about 8 miles.

There's lots to explore in that area; I'll go back next summer and find a better route. I'll also bring more water and a map.

Even though it was not a fun ride; it was still worthwhile. Lots of obvious lessons there that I'm embarrassed to think that I still need to learn.