Reframing

After the crazy sun and warm weather yesterday, I figured RSP would be mostly ridable. My expectation was that we'd get into the trails and be able to haul ass and rail into the dirt as we did on our first fat-bike outing at RSP a few weeks ago.

I was thinking a few northerly-facing sections might be covered with ice and snow, there would be a lot of soft spots, but mostly riding would be clear.

And that was pretty accurate -- if you're only measuring broadly: anywhere there wasn't a trail my thinking held up. Unfortunately, the trails have been ridden and trodden upon verily over the last few weeks, so the they were sheer ice almost exclusively.

We arrive at about 7:20 AM this morning. We were bumming as we pulled into the 7-mile trailhead and saw all the iced-over trails. Glen hopped on his bike, rolled over a section of trail, and the bike just instantly slid out from under him.

The picture above shows a pretty standard trail. I think we were both sort of silently pondering a bail-out plan, but we ended up tooling around a bit.

After a while though, we found it pretty fun to avoid the trails. In fact, there were sections where the trail sort of provided a general direction. With fat bikes and low pressure, just cutting through the forest was pretty easy. And fun. Especially descending through sections of non-trailed forests. We cut down a couple of steep long hills, rolling and hopping over deadfall and avoiding branches and trees as we picked up speed.

We ended up riding for over 2 hours. It was great.

I'm thinking it's probably not great form to go cutting through the forest off the trails. That approach doesn't scale well. And riding the edge of the existing trails is not something that scales well either. Over time, with many riders doing these things both approaches would pretty much trash bits of the forest and overly widen the trails I suppose.

But I realized a couple things here: firstly, I was reminded as I often am when I set my expectations for bike trips, that they don't often turn out as you think they will. The key to enjoying shattered expectations is to reframe and figure out how to make them fun.

Liza likes to tell me of time in highschool when she was hanging out with a mutual friend of ours at a restaurant. A song came on that she thought was cheesy and she mentioned this to our buddy.

He agreed it was a cheesy song.

"But," he said, "Try this. Imagine this is your most favorite song of all time. It's the song that changed your life because you love it so much..."

When you listen to a cheesy song or end up on a shitty ride, this is a great place to approach the shittiness from. It's true: try it with a lame song. If you really reframe, you can love any crap song or shit ride.

Rolling up and seeing this sheet of ice everywhere can make you turn around, or make you get creative about different ways of having fun on your bike.

The second thing I realized was that I really want to figure out a cool camping trip for the Pugsley. Low pressure, fast spinning, slow rolling over logs, mud, snow, ice, etc is really working for me right now. I'd really enjoy a few days of that kind of riding capped by camping under the stars with some TenFidy.

Euclid Road - The Dirt One

I've always wanted to check out the area up on the cliff just west of the Riverside State Park. From the Centennial Trail around RSP, you can see the homes up on the cliff overlooking the valley below. I found the road. There's a road up there called "Indians Bluff Road." I should've guessed. It's your typical run of McMansions on the hill. I saw your basic 4000 square foot monstrosities that are loosely based, architecturally speaking, on various styles: the Tuscan Turd, the Modern Box, the NW Rugged Getaway. No matter, since all of these sprawling homes are fortressed with various types of tall gates and walls that scream fear and paranoia far louder than the pseudo styles they attempt to emulate.



I'm pretty sure this poor dude was trapped; he was so listless. Or maybe he's their pet? Regardless, he wasn't acting very deer-like as I stood there and photo'd him. The maze of fences surrounding this house was incredible. And they were high.

Anyway, of course Indians Bluff Road is a dead end that terminates in a gated private community. The first house in here was a straw bale house going up. The sign out front said "Sustainable Building." Yeah.

Luckily, backing out of Indian Bluffs Road is downhill, so I made a conscious effort to flush the foul mood that these kind of neighborhoods always put me in.

I focused on this charmer at the cross roads of Euclid and Indian Bluffs Road.

As far as I can tell, it's still being operated as a school.

Euclid Road continues west to Heyford Road, which takes you to Airway Heights. Euclid has some nice dirt patches and there's likely some more dirt roads out here worth exploring. The West Plains is an area that I have not ridden much.

Coming back into town from Airway Heights, I took the Sunset Highway. The piece that comes into town from the junction of Highway 2/Sunset should really go on a road diet. We could have a great route to/from the airport if this section of Sunset Highway was turned into two lanes (instead of four) with a turn lane and big fat bike lane shoulders. All that space made sense when this road was the interstate back in the 50's, but now, with I-90, the traffic volume is just nothing.

CSF Ride

Breakfast of Champions

About a month ago, I started a Cycling Spokane Forum. The primary reason was to create a place where people looking to take chilled rides could post ideas/plans. There are other local forums (well, at least one) that is great for finding rides where --judging by the comments in the form -- pushing hard and fast is the goal.

I'm slow and I like to stop and take photos and maybe have a snack or look at something. The purpose of the forum, generally, is to find folks that like a more laid back ride. I'm not diss'in on fast/hard pushing rides or cyclists. I just want an alternative. Cycling doesn't have to be an extreme activity.

I guess my goal with the forum is to provide a place where the stop-and-smell-the-roses types can find riding company without the fear of slowing others down too much. We're not slugs, but we're not in a super hurry either.

Five of us took a ride today and ended up at De Leon Foods Deli and Grocery. Most of us tried the menudo and most of us had huevos rancheros for breakfast. Damn good destination. Over breakfast some other ride ideas sprouted:

• Tour de Taco: A good Saturday afternoon ride. Take a tour around town to all of the great taco-wagon-type Mexican places and have a taco and beer at each one. We came up with 3 or 4 places stretching from the northside out to the valley.


• Overnighters: starting with a "shake down" overnighter for the uninitiated. This would be at Riverside State Park in early spring. The idea would be to try out your gear/packing/etc and be close to home so it's not awful if you screwed up. Next overnighter: Long Lake.


• Rail trail tours: from Rosalia out the John Wayne trail to where ever. Or: how far into Montana can you go 0n Rail Trails?


• The Bead/Priest Lake weekend: ride or drive up to the Priest/Bead neighborhood, set up camp and ride the logging roads for a long weekend.

Anyone is welcome to join the forum. If this stuff sounds fun, join in the discussion and take a ride with us.

Last Minute S24O with the Family

We'd been talking of doing some bike camping this weekend. Friday didn't work out. Saturday came and went. Then Sunday, at about noon, we decided to give a go. It was a huge success. We left home at about 4pm. We were at Riverside State Park by 4:45 or so. We got home this morning at about 9 AM.

The S24O's I've been doing solo have helped hone the camping process quite a bit. We brought just the right amount of stuff. We were warm and comfy and did not want for anything.

The one bummer is that the guy working the pay station at Riverside State Park hadn't gotten the memo on the biker sites. I didn't feel like trying to work it up the command chain on a quiet Sunday afternoon and there were plenty of sites open anyway. But it was disappointing that the hiker/biker site policy has not been baked into the overall training program for the front desk folks.

Regardless, we enjoyed a nice night: an hour or so chatting while Maddie played on the sandy river bank, followed by dinner, some minor exploration, and to bed. We were up at 7AM and having coffee at The Scoop by 9 AM.

We all decided that it was so easy and so low impact -- that we would do this very regularly this summer.

Downtown Bike Bathroom. Pumpers. Family Bike Camping

If you're downtown and need to use a restroom, but you don't have a bike lock -- go to the bathroom next to the gondolas in Riverfront Park. You can ride your bike right in there and take care of business.

Can you pump up a tire? Then Pedals2People needs your help. Go here and find the events with titles that begin with "KHQ". Then show up and help us out. We're also doing a free bike tune up day at West Central Community Center this Sunday.

Wanna go on a family bike caravan and camp out at Riverside State Park? I'm thinking June 23rd 22nd; leave the fountain at noon. If you're interested email me.

Trail Riding at Riverside State Park

Well. There they are. Joe's super fancy nice Karate Monkey and my mountain-afied Rivendell Atlantis. We met up this morning and rode out to Riverside State Park to do the initial shakedown ride on our newly built-up bikes. A few thoughts on some of the stuff that plodded its way through my brain on the ride:

• RSP is a wonderful place. We met downtown at 6AM and were on the trails by 6:40 or so-- we would've been earlier if we didn't noodle around on some trails around People's Park. The point: we're lucky to have such an amazing network of trials so close to town.
• Riding rocky single track is a whole different ballgame with 2.1" knobbies when compared to 35mm semi-slicks. It's just more fun.
• Riding 2.1" knobbies on smooth fire trail and pavement (the combination of both likely made up about 85% of our mileage this morning) is tiring and hard to get used to. Now I understand why so many folks drive their bikes to the trials. It's still cheesy. But I understand the temptation now.
• A quick ride on the Karate Monkey confirmed something that I wasn't ready to concede: 29ers do appear to roll better for these conditions. In general Joe's bike is just bigger and feels right for the kind of riding we were doing. I'll need to spend more time on the KM before I am completely sold on the 29er idea. There are many differences between the bikes we rode this morning to attribute just to tire size. Plus, I know it's silly on the face of it, but really, 650b (584mm) does make a bunch of sense to me as a good mountain bike size. The Rivendell folks are building a 650b mountain bike. And Pancenti was showing a 650b mountain bike at NAHBS.
• Mountain/Trail riding is all about the bursts of energy. I forgot about how in tune you need to be around shifting. You really need to anticipate your shifting if you want to stay on the bike over a series of steep descents and climbs. Aerobically, I was quickly peaking, then resting, then pushing. It will be fun to figure out the aerobic plan around trail riding.
• Trail 25 at RSP is a great route. It's a giant circle that feeds a bunch of smaller trails. There is a newbie section there that Joe and I found. If you've gone to RSP and have ridden 25 all the way and without a person in the know, then you know what I'm talking about. A bit of sand. We'll leave it at that for the next set of rookies.
• A guy could spend many many hours learning the trail system at RSP. This is an exciting prospect for me as I have tired of many of the local road routes I do.
• Trail 204 -- going downhill is about the most fun I've had in a long while. Just a long straight descent with no obstacles.

If you are interested in joining us, Joe and I will be meeting Monday mornings throughout the summer to explore RSP. We'll meet at 5:30 AM on Monday mornings -- at Rocket Market in Carnegie Square. The idea will be to be back down town by 8:30.

First Impressions

Got the tandem. Liza and Maddie took it for a couple turns up and down the alley yesterday, then a couple laps around the tennis courts today.

Me: Maddie, do you like it?

Maddie: I don't like it. I love it. It's awesome.

That is a direct quote. She's 4. Liza likes it too. Score one for the old man -- a bike purchase the whole family loves.

This bike will change our lives.

We need to do some fendering and lighting and baggaging and handlebarring and general fussing, then we're good to go. But it is ridable now.

I foresee many an overnighter at Riverside State Park this summer.

So excited.

Waiting Through the Big V

The long-awaited update on my personal reproductive heath status: I got the big V today. One perfect child is enough. Now I wait to ride. The doctor says one month. I think he's suppossed to say that. My plan: play it by the book and be super hard core with the ice pack for 3 days. Minimize the movement and maximize the frozen pea contact. From there, we'll see where we're at. In the meantime, I can think and plan about the riding I want to do this summer.

The Basics
To start, I'm going to kick up the gear on the fixed gear. Since I busted my 40t chainring, I'm going to inch up to a 42. At the moment, the smallest 110 bcd chainring I have is a 46t biopace. I've had that on there the last couple days and that's good for a vigorous heart-attack-inducing workout. I may keep it on for a while though. Keeping such a high gear on the fixed will pretty much keep me off the single track for a while, but it may be just the ticket for getting my fitness level up a bit to the next level. I'm not really a whacko about "fitness levels" but I do feel like I've been in a rut the last month or so, unable to really enjoy the longer non-fixed rides as much. It's weird because the harder I ride the fixed, the more fun and chilled out the non-fixed rides are.

The S24O and Family Camping
I think I'll start doing at least a once-a- monthly S24O in March. S24O == sub-24-hour overnighter. Grant Petersen over at Rivendell has honed a basic overnighter idea into a very compelling story with a cool name: the S24O. I did a few last year and I want to do more this year. It's still freezing at night. I think 40F will be my threshold for low temps. So we'll be good to go in a couple weeks. Last year I did Bald Knob on Mt Spokane, Williams Lake, Hunters, and a couple at Riverside State Park. There was one S36O up at Pioneer Park too. This year, I'll do Bald Knob again; I want to explore some areas on the Spokane river between the confluence and the Tum Tum area. I also want to check out a potential spot in the Badger Lake area. I'd also like to find someone who knows the Selkirk range area and get up there.

As for family camping, we'll be picking up Maddie's tandem next week, so we'll have a good bike that we can load up with equipment and do a run to Riverside State Park. I'm hoping to get some other families going this year too. So, if you have a young one or young ones and want to give a family overnighter a shot, get in touch. The ride to RSP is about 10 miles from the South Hill and this year the park will hopefully have Hiker/Biker sites available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Longer Tours
Last year I was only able to get in one longer tour. I went with a couple buddies up to Vancouver Island and had a nice ride around the southern part of the island for about 4 days. This year, we're planning on tooling around the rural highways and logging roads of Mount St. Helens for 5 days.
The picture there is our planned route. This will be a fun ride. Lots of dirt roads, lots of swimming, lots of great views and remote camping.
Liza and I are also going to try and squeeze in a 3 or 4 day ride up to BC. The idea will be to drop Maddie off at the Grandparents' Speare house up there on the Kettle River and ride up to Castlegar, then come back through the US around Northport and do some dirt roads back to the Grandparents house. This will be a "credit-card" type touring trip, where we'll stay in hotels and B&B's instead of self-contained, where we camp and stink more.

We'll also try and get a weekend or two up in Bayview where we have access to a float house. We did this last year. Although Bayview isn't our favorite place in the world to hang out, we've found a pleasant route up through Athol that puts us in Bayview for the first night. The next morning we ride down to Coeur d' Alene and spend the day tooling around the city, have a nice dinner, then ride back to Spokane the next day on the Centennial Trail. It's a nice two and half day jaunt.

Finally, there's a chance I may take a few days in September with another buddy who wants to try some loaded touring. I'd love to hit Hiway 20 that time of year, but I think we'd need longer than I'll be able to take from work at that point. I think a loop up to upper Priest Lake and over to Metaline and back would be a fun ride, especially if we could find some cool logging roads on the way back.

It'll be a fun summer.

It's All About the Kids

I am on the Spokane Bicycle Advisory Board. We advise the City of Spokane on things related to bicycling. Seeing change and the effect of our work is a long long process -- measured in years. So I was pretty skeptical when I wrote off a quick e-mail a couple weeks ago to the park manager at Bowl and Pitcher (B&P) State Park suggesting they add bike/hiker camp sites.

B&P is a great local thing to have: basically a full-service campground on a giant river with hundreds of acres of unique topography just a couple miles from downtown. If you look around Spokane, you see a lot of amazingly cool things like this (trails on the bluff, Fish Lake Trail, Minnehaha, Dishman Hills, etc etc) -- but anyway. The great thing about B&P is that you can kind of spontaneously decide to go bike camping with the family on a Friday or Saturday afternoon: load up your bikes with the minimalist gear in an hour, then a short ride (a good chunk of which is on the Centennial Trail) and you're camping. There's swimming, hiking, exploring and just general camping/outdoors stuff.

So anyway: the email. I'm getting there. Last year, Maddie and I did one of these spontaneous deals and showed up at B&P on a Friday afternoon and the place was full. I was shocked that they turned us away -- two people on a bike. Our overall footprint was one 2-person tent and the bike. The park is sprawling and huge. They wouldn't even let us set up in the day use area on cement! Policy is policy. We ended up going further down the river and camping in the bush, which is fun too, but with Maddie, we would've been happier in the campground.

Anyway: I sent an email to the park manager/ranger, Rene, who emailed me back the next day informing me that the park officials were about to meet to discuss issues for the upcoming season. And then about a week later, she emails me back:

Hello John, We are going to establish two

hiker/biker sites that are on a first come first serve basis.

They will be located at the Bowl and Pitcher.

I'll let you know the locations when we receive

the approval from our parks planner. Thanks Rene'

That may be my biggest and best contribution to the world of cycling in my life. And I want it documented here.