SOS pics

Every Sunday, Joe and I take pretty much the same ride. We call it the SOS ride... same old shit. Routine is good. It's a socially paced trail ride. As the season gets warmer, the pace picks up. Sometimes people join us.

Patrick joins us frequently.

This time of year we end up skirting around the ice floes and the SOS route is tweaked. Normally it just follows the river. Bikely map here.

The SOS ride is often the highlight of my riding in a given week.

Today we went up through Riverside Cemetery, over the tracks, and down through the archery range. Still a fair bit of ice and snow.

This ride is only about an hour and 20 minutes or so. Coffee is an important part of the ride. We used to stop at Indaba, but they don't do Sundays anymore, so they're dead to us now. Shame. That was great coffee.

Now we stop at Atticus, which has a pretty good drip about 75% of the time. That's a C average, but it actually beats the pants off of nearly every coffee place in town.

A year later

Here's Jon's Kogswell, almost exactly a year ago. Fancy and new.

Jon rides this bike like a demon. He rides all of his bikes as if possessed. I'm pretty fascinated by Jon and how he rides and deals (or doesn't) with his bikes. I wrote a magazine article about it (pdf).

Jon showed up to last weekend's Sunday SOS ride on the Kogswell. The SOS ride is not a technical trail ride, but it is a trail ride. Jon is sort of the king of unintended underbiking, so he wasn't too phased by having the "wrong" bike.

We went through the graveyard and on the river trail and re-grouped under the mega church there -- by the exposed water pipe/fence. And I noticed his rear fender stay had become unattached. In fact, his stays and fenders area all bent up.

Thankfully the fenders are steel and the stays are 5mm aluminum rod, so nothing's getting getting all shanked up in the wheel. This is a big benefit of steel and aluminum fenders in my mind. And the fact that they can be bent back, to a degree.

As I'm fussing with the fender stay, Justin asks innocently, "is that a broken spoke?" Sure enough. Jon also has a broken spoke. We speculate on how long it's been broken. I should've looked closer at the break to see if it was dirty or not, but I wanted to ride, so I didn't get all GP on it, I just twisted it around another spoke to keep it in place.

The 26" wheels (not 650b) were a big selling point for this bike becoming a Jon-bike. I figured 36 hole 26" wheels were a good overbuilt solution for a guy like Jon and they could probably hold up for a while, even with a broken spoke. Sho'nuf.

It's Wednesday now. Jon is still riding the wheel with a broken spoke. My guess is that he'll ride it until another one or two or three spokes break and the wheel just won't spin.

Both of his back up bikes are also dead at the moment.

Two Wheel Transit is his shop -- head's up guys.

SOS classic

Classic SOS ride today. To have a classic, Joe must be there. It must follow a classic route. It must be socially paced. And the capper: it must end at Indaba.

Done. Done. Done. and Done.

Glen. Clipping out.

Joe

A bit a of snow. Likely a "trace" in the parlance of the pros.

Indaba

Something witty and irreverent

This should really go on the Elephant site, but it was among the pics on my phone. This is a bike that was just finished last week. Bling!

The HD trails are not even close. There was about a 2.5 day window a couple weeks ago where they were drained, non-tacky, and fast. I hoped the bit of warmth and sun we had yesterday might have cleared them up. No luck. It was a super slog on the way home up the trails.

This pic was supposed to show the little pellet snow hail things that were falling. They may barely be visible on "big," but I sort of like the view shot that resulted instead. Moody windy day yesterday on the trails.

What's this? That would be Elephant v2. With luck I will be riding it  tomorrow afternoon or for the SOS ride on Sunday.

Some SOS pics

More remote art.

It can be too easy to ride by these kinds of views without looking. This is a great time of year for color.

After a bit of rain the river trail is in great shape. 

I love this bike. I need to spray it down.

Tony. He's showed up for 3 or 4 weeks now. He's pretty new to trail riding and crashes sort of frequently. That's a good sign in my opinion.  

Justin's bday ride

Justin, Joe, Bill, Pat, me

Normally, being Sunday and all, I'd advocate for the SOS trail ride. But Pat pointed out that the weather wizards were saying 100% chance of rain. He further suggested that perhaps a be-fendered dirt/back-road ride might make more sense than a trail ride.

How right Pat was on both accounts. What's nice about a Sunday road ride is that it's more social than a trail ride. A guy can chat and carry on.

We didn't have much of a route planned -- except to go up Greenwood and tool around the dirt roads up there in that Deno/Euclid area. As we passed Euclid the rain had stopped for a minute, so we decided to loop it out around Riverside State Park, which requires a bit of trail riding to find the Centennial Trail.

Bill and Pat walking down the hill -- this was right after Bill slipped.

The trails were slippery, muddy, wet, etc. Our descent into the valley where Centennial Trail lives required traversing a trail that was rockier than I remember... assuming I was remembering the right descent. Anyway: lots of big bouldery wet round rocks littered the descent. I had worked on my bike last night, so of course my front brake failed as I tore down this section. Bill "slipped."

But it was it all worth it... it's nice to put some dirt and double-track on a ride, especially on Sundays. It feels right.

Paths like this are why I like finding a reason to cut through Riverside State Park.

Post-ride, Justin, Pat, and I celebrated Justin's bday by having him buy us breakfast at Central Foods. The rain picked up a tad as we ate and the wind knocked over our parked bikes.

That's all the relevant detail.

V2 thoughts

I got the v2 right in the heat of the Grand Fondo funk, so I was pretty much spending all of my non-commute time on the 747.  So for any road/non-trail riding, I've been defaulting to the 747 for months.

I see the v2 as all about S24O's, exploring dirt roads, commuting, overnight hauls, and moderately loaded touring. But I haven't been doing any of that in the last month or so.

So, in anticipation of summer, I ripped off the fenders, put the taller rack on, and mounted the super bad-arse Quasimoto tires.

Can we just talk about how f'ing rad these tires are? I got hung up on some rail road routing on my SOS ride today. This required riding about a mile on some rail rock, which at times was off-camber and/or dotted with deeper sand and/or bigger jagged basalt chunks. The Quasi's just ate this up. They're huge - volume-wise, and they're tacky, and they bite just enough on the dirt. What's weird is how well they roll on pavement -- they're no Hetre, but they are suprisingly fast on the road, given how uncompromising they are in the dirt.

I need to bring these bars in one centimeter. The wanker in me wants to swap out the stem and bars for the Ritchey WCS versions to get this centimeter w/out changing the length of my stem. I did that on the 747 and it's all perfect and wonderful. The issue here is that the Campy brifters push my reach out about a centimeter more than the aero levers I had on there for v1. But I'm working the austerity angle at the moment, so I'll be strong and just try putting a shorter stem on there with the Noodles.

Anyway, this bike, with the drops and the fatty knobbies really comes into its own. When Pat is done and recovered from his cross-state journey, I'll get over there and get a lasher rack built for this bike. That will allow me to put my bulky light stuff (sleeping pad and bag) on the rear wheel, while carrying my basics in a bag above the front wheel. (A lasher rack is yet another Alex-idea -- see hint of implementation at on this Pat post).

I've got mid-July through mid-August off of work, so I plan on doing a bunch of bike camping and exploring with Pat Rick (and anyone else who wants to come and hang at the river) in the Colville Nat'l Forest.

The v2 will start seeing some good action.

2 unrelated things

Joe took me to Beacon Hill today for the non-SOS ride. It was rad. We rode out, climbed to the top, then snaked down on twisty, swoopy, super-fun single track. Beacon Hill is great. I think this is my third time there. I think Joe and I went there about 5 years ago and tooled around. I went there with Ben Tobin and a demo double-boinger and he tried to kill me a couple years ago. And then today.

I gotta say, the pump tracking is having an impact on my skills. In this short time on the pump track, I've gone from mediocre bike-handling to mediocre+a bit better bike-handling. Seriously, the banked turns coming down a couple sections of the Beacon descent were smoother than they would otherwise be if I hadn't been shredding at Pat's. Of course, most of the banked corners I still hit too hot and screwed up the exit, but I nailed a couple 90 degree turns.

And I can breathe again. Which is so wonderful.  And by breathing, I mean "on-bike recovery." Lovely.

All that charred vegetable matter will be a salsa tomorrow.

On an unrelated note. I fired up the super inferno back woods home jobber char kit this afternoon and burned off a bunch of stuff for Ben's hang tomorrow night. This is an official appeal to my normal bikey buddies that I hang with -- and have hanged with in the past (you know who you are) -- please come over tomorrow at 6. There's food and beer. I told Ben I'd do a big fat hang here and it would just suck royally if no one showed up. So be rad and back me up here!

some stuff

I think we need a longer stem on this bike. This picture doesn't illustrate the need for it. I think we have one more season on this frame. 

The river is wonderfully high right now. I've got the old mountain bike rev'd up. I took it out a couple times this weekend. If all goes as planned, this bike will be swapped out for a new Elephant hardtail 650b mountain bike this spring.

This is a great bike. I'll be taking it to Orcas in about a week and a half for a few days of single track funnery with some friends. It's the next year's version of this ride. 

First SOS ride of the season happened this morning. Rough stuff. We're all wheezy and shakey and weird. But I love this ride -- we came home through the park to check out the flow, which did not disappoint.

More flowers

 SOS ride with Cory today.

The HD trails are crazy with flowers. Crazy.

And there's now a giant set of platform-style stairs leading up the west slope from the suspension bridge at Bowl and Pitcher.

I didn't get a shot of the river, which obviously is raging right now. There were a couple small spots on the Mega-church trail that were submerged. And a few bits of trail underwater on the east side river trail.

Thinning

 So it's come to this: once a week blog posts with almost no content. I've just been too slammed to put anything up here. And bikewise: I'm barely doing anything. A guy can only write so much about the boring-ass flat 20 miles on a multi-user trail that is my commute.

Highlight of last weeks' commute: coal train.
Not to be confused with a soul train.

However, now that I'm in academia (ahem), I will get big gobs of time off throughout the year. In about two weeks I'll start a nearly month-long break. My buddy Bill (of Bill's Ass fame) asked me what I was going to do with all this time and I didn't have a good answer, except, "Well, I plan to catch up on writing a bunch of product reviews."

And that's true, because they're piling up; I'm obligated, and that's pretty much my game plan for maintaining my high-zoot, high-maintenance wardrobe over the next few years.

One thing that's interesting about this end-of-quarter thing that never struck me back when I was a student 20 years ago, is the finality of it all. After being in the software business forever, my take on schedules is that they are always these negotiable, slippery, hand-wavy, mystical, enigmatic guessing games of chicken.

 But in school: the end of the quarter is a hard f'ing date that is REAL. And that is both a mutha of a reality biter and a wonderful thing of forcing-function beauty.

So while you're in the overwhelming depth of work with more crushing down upon you and wondering how you will ever get it all done, there's an underlying calm in the knowledge that it will all be over and done in just a handful of weeks. It's a wonderfully liberating place to be, especially if you've been in a similar work-crushing scenario where you just can't see an end or solution in sight. Ever. I'm in heaven here.

Anyway. "Thinning," is the title of this post. The point. And thinning is not what I'm doing unfortunately. Pat is. That dude is slimming down.

We went riding a couple weeks ago and he was on his new tires that he was so excited about. We were resting at the top of a particularly difficult climb when I asked him, "How are your knards?"

And that was in earnest. I didn't even think about the double entendre there until he sort of paused, tilted his head a bit, furrowed his brow, and then broke into a laugh, "They're great. They really stick."

The next weekend, as I rode behind him, I couldn't help noticing that his ass was shrinking. My verbalizing that fact, in the context of the previous weeks' fox paw, turned out to be a bit awkward.

And now I'm realizing that I started this post off with an off-handed reference to Bill's ass and I'm  feeling sort of odd about it all.

The fact is, the thinning refers to some work that is going on down on the HD trails, which, incidentally, are just friggin teaming with runners, hikers, and dogs on Sunday mornings. Joe and I rode down there this morning and were reminded why the SOS River Trail ride has become the standard Sunday morning route.

They're taking out a zillion little scrawny trees and chipping them up across the forest floor. It's a good plan, as a fire down there is just a matter of time.