Fish Lake Trail

There's a well-coordinated and supported effort to pave the Fish Lake Trail from Fish Lake to the Centennial Trail. Personally, I'm sort of in the middle on this one. One of my favorite quick runs is a ride through the unpaved portion of the Fish Lake Trail. I have it documented on Bikely.

I really enjoy riding Thorpe Road, which is a nice dirt county road, and hooking up to the trail at the top of the hill on Thorpe. The trail is some single-track, double-track, and contains all sorts of surfaces: sand, hard-pack, pebbles, "rail" rock. It's an interesting ride -- and fun. Right now the pavement starts about 2 miles out of Marshall and goes for about 3 miles, where you end up on a Burlington-Northern access road, cross two sets of live tracks, and then another mile to the Fish Lake Trail head parking lot, where the trail is paved to Curtis Road/Cheney. I enjoy taking a fattish-tired road bike or fixed gear on this route. So as I think about FLT being paved, it kind of bums me out, because today this is a quiet, under-used, no-traffic bike route.

Folks pushing for pavement here suggest that this will be an ideal commuter route for Cheney-Spokane commuters. Maybe so. The Cheney-Spokane Road is a good route for that too, although there are some pieces that are a bit tight.

The major cost of the project is not in paving, but in putting up overpasses over two live railroad tracks. I can't remember the numbers exactly, but what I seem to remember is that there is about a $6 million cost for this project; $4 million of which is for the overpasses. That's a good gob of money.

It's interesting what draws bike-related money -- people love the idea of multi-use paths with no traffic. I understand the draw, but if I had $6 million for bike-stuff in Spokane, I'd be pretty satisfied with the Centennial Trail. If you're a recreational cyclist; Spokane is great. You've got to be happy.

On the face of it, it sounds crazy, but, thinking about it, I'd blow most of that wad on education: teaching drivers and cyclists that it's ok and normal and lawful for cyclists to use the road. Like the "seat belt saves lives" campaign when I was a kid. There was a time no one wore seat belts. Then we were clobbered for years with TV, radio, print ads that told us to wear seat belts. In addition, there was a threat of fines if you didn't wear a seat belt.

What if we did the same for cyclist/driver-education? What if the message: "cyclists have the same rights to the road as a car; bikes are vehicles; cyclists have the same responsibility to follow the rules of the road as car drivers" was pounded into us everywhere we turned? What if we taught our kids, in school, how to safely ride in traffic? What if parents rode their kids to school, on bikes, while following traffic laws? What if the WSDOT manual and related driver training had more emphasis on bikes-as-traffic? What if your traffic violation doubled if cyclists were in the area, as we do for work zones? What if cops busted cyclists for traffic violations or riding on the sidewalk?

Eventually, I think we'd see a lot more folks riding their bikes in traffic and a lot less need for more multi-use trails.

Oh yeah, and if there was any money left over; I'd be painting some sharrows.

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.

My Weak Contribution to People Who Want to Fix Thier Broken Brooks Saddle

That there is a picture of a Brooks b-17 saddle that is about to be man-handled by two hairy men for an hour. When it comes to re-railing, that B-17 is one tough customer.

I busted the rails on it last summer when I was riding around Vancouver Island. It's a bummer, because the saddle was only about 3 years old and just starting to break in. I ordered a replacement frame for it about 6 months ago and just got around to fixing it now. My plan was to take photos along the way as we fixed it. If you lurk around the iBOB or Touring bike lists as I do, you'll come across a number of folks who have broken the rails on the Brooks saddles that have the copper-coated rails. So, I was thinking I'd be doing a great public service to sort of document and photo the re-railing of the saddle for the benefit of mankind. I didn't do too well on that account.

The reality is, you just have to brute force that sucker on there. The deal is, is that the leather is really stretched over the frame. There's quite a bit of tension there. As we figured, you have two options:

1. Fit the nose hardware in the front and attempt to pull the leather over the rear of the saddle while you punch in the rivets, or

2. Punch in two of the rivets in the rear, then figure out a way to jam the front hardware into the nose.

Option 1 seemed impossible. We had some extra rivets so we decided to go with Option 2, figuring that we could drill out the rivets and go back to Option 1 if we totally hit the wall.

As I mention, it took about an hour. It's brute force and some filing and squeezing the front hardware in a vise to shape and squish it a bit. There's some wrestling, some swearing, some head scratching, and a large rubber mallet involved as well. If you have a saddle with a broken rail and you are trying to get it repaired, all of this non-precise instruction will make sense. Granted, it likely won't help much, but it will make sense.
After you force the front hardware into the nose, punching the rivets is pretty straight forward. It's also a two person job. One person to hold the saddle and the punch and the other to strike the punch. I'd love to see some pictures of the folks at the Brooks factory putting these together. They must have some pretty specialized vices and hardware.


Updates
Swapped
Bike swap will be next year. There's a back story there, and it will be told. And I will tell it. But not now.

Trek
I've been riding the Trek and it's everything I want it to be. It's back at Hairy Gary's getting fit for a convertible rack. He says a week. I say I'll start bugging him in a week. It is a really fun bike to ride.

Liza is Certified
This should be the headliner -- Liza did her 2 weeks at UBI and just got her test results back today. She is officially a Certified Bicycle Technician. She took lots of pictures of bikes and there's a couple shots of her at UBI here. UBI is not an easy course -- Liza didn't have a ton of mechanical experience going in, so she had to work super hard. And she did: staying late, going in on the weekend to practice.
She rules. Since she's been home, she's totally reworked our little shop into a pristine workshop; she's built two wheels; overhauled her daily driver; swapped out a crank set and handlebars on my buddy's RB-T; and has a bike to-do list a mile long.

Bicycle Advisory Board
Next Meeting. All meetings open to the public: Tuesday -- Feb 20th, 6PM in the City Hall, bottom floor in the Council Briefing Chambers.

Funkenstien and Other Random Fillers

Oh my god! I want to do more riding but I'm a lazy bastard. I've got into the post holiday funk and it's a hard climb out. I will, no matter what, start getting out again in two weeks. Really. It's not that I have to for some weird-o regiment here. It's that I have to because my whole world just sucks when I'm not getting out and riding a few miles first thing in the morning. I'm going nuts here. Why two weeks then? Well, Liza is in Ashland OR at UBI. That's a bike school. She's learning bike maintenance and loving it. That will hopefully relieve me as the primary bike fixer in the family, and I'll finally learn the right way to do things from her. Anyway, I'm on my own until she gets back and it's sort of frowned upon to leave your 4 year old at home alone in the morning. So that's my excuse for now. Come back in two weeks and see what it is.

Bike Swapin'
Ok, Spokane needs a bike swap. Make that "the Inland Northwest." I'm on a mission with some friends here to put something together. Watch this space.

Dumb bike update
A month or so ago I wrote a review on 63xc.com about our funny Fuji fixed gear mountain bike. Here's the URL if you're interested: http://www.63xc.com/johnspeare/laidback.htm. Anyway, I expected not to like this bike. But I've been digging it. It was intended for Liza, but she pretty much hates it. Way too much reach. I tried mustache bars, flared drop bars, flat mountain bars and we've finally hit on something she doesn't hate as much: big-ass flared albatross bars. I'll take a picture one day. Anyway, I haul Maddie to school with this bike every day. When I have to make a run to the store, this is the bike I grab. It's like an SUV. It's got huge studded fat tires on it. It's geared super low and as a fixed gear, it can just go everywhere as long as you're willing to sacrifice your knees to get there. With the albatross bars, I really like it more than any other iteration.

The end-all-be-all-bike update
I think I've ridden my Garyized trek a total of about 11 miles. There were a couple days there where snow was not covering the ground and I got in a couple short rides. It rules. I've not changed any of the issues I wrote about in the last blog -- so, there's still work to be done. I've decided that I really can't provide a full on report on exactly how much it rules until I do a really long ride on it. Like at least 50 miles. But really, it should be around a 100 miles. Those in the know say that low trail bike are better handling for folks that are about to fall over from exhaustion. So I need to test the bike under those conditions. At my current rate of non-ridingness, maybe I'll only need a 10 mile ride or so to test it out.

Ugg. I don't even want heat here. I just want clear roads. Not roads that are mostly clear with the randomly, yet well-placed ice patch, but clear. And above 30F.

Behold: The Hairy-Garyized 1983 Trek 520

About a month ago, I went on and on about making the perfect bike from an old Trek I had. Well, the work is done and the result looks great. I would like to report on the riding/handling characteristics, but when it snowed about 6 inches as soon as I got it built up. I did wrestle it around the neighborhood in the deep snow, and for what that was worth, it felt good... so, more to come on that.

The idea with this bike is that it will truly be a do-everything bike. It's got fattish tires for trail riding. The 650b fanatics swear that the tire size is a perfect road tire too. The front fork was raked to 58mm to provide for 40mm of trail. This front-end geometry will allow for primary loads to be carried comfortably up front.

A couple issues I still need to figure out.

Gearing: Right now the gearing is 45/34 up front and 12/32 in the rear. I'd be happier with a slightly lower gear to make this truly a go almost anywhere bike. I couldn't fit a triple on there with the bottom brackets that I had in my stash (even though the longest was 122.5!), so I'm thinking a 94mm BCD double that will allow me to go 44/30 up front may be on this bike in the future. My buddy Alex runs his Trek of the same year with that combo up front and it makes a lot of sense. I've ridden it and it's great: you have a single cruising rang with the 44 spread across the rear cassette, then a bail-out gear with the 30t chain ring. Alex provides a more thorough explanation on his blog. Read it. Good stuff.

Decaluer

I'm not sure if that's how you spell that, but a decaluer is a device that allows you to remove a front handle bar bag quickly and provides support for the bag when it's on your bike. I have one and it slides in on the headset stack. The fork was not cut long on this bike originally. I also added a brake cable hanger to the stack to accommodate the new front cantilever brake. This bike originally shipped with side-pulls. So, no room on the stack. My original thinking was to replace the headset, since the one I have on there is goofy for reasons I don't want to go into. I could replace the headset with one that could give me a lot more stacking room. But now, I'm thinking I just may find a brake cable holder to attach to the actual stem. I've used those before and while not elegant: they work.

Lighting

I still have a rack coming from Gary that will fit onto the existing rack. More on that later. Once that comes I'll figure out where to put the front headlight.

Front Brake Pad Clearance

There ain't much. This picture shows my hack for now. Alex recommended finding a canti-brake that mounts the brake further in the front. I've got a stack of canti-brakes here so, I'll find one that works. But I do love the 986's. So easy to set up.

Finally, let me say this: Hairy Gary is great. His work is great. Go here for more detailed pics of this frame. Everything he did is perfect: the rear-spacing is dead on 135mm. The braze-ons for the canti's look like they grew out of the frame. All the spacing for all the braze-ons he did are perfect. He re-shaped the front rack to fit the width of the forks. Just perfect work all around and a killer deal; just over $300 for the work and the paint job. Paint is powder coat. I asked for sparkles in any color and he delivered. I can't wait to get on this bike and go.

Dang it's Cold

And Liza is still smiling.

Third Tuesday of the month: that can only mean one thing. Tonight, 6pm Bicycle Advisory Board meeting. All are welcome. City Hall in the Council Briefing Chambers. In the basement. Ride your bike there and be heard!

Palouse'ing

Since moving back to Spokane about 3 years ago, I've stayed clear of the Palouse as a riding destination. I think the reason is that my memory of the Palouse is two roads: the Palouse Highway and Valley Chapel Road. The memory of driving around these roads as a teen hadn't inspired me to go and ride them later as an adult. This last summer I spent some time getting reacquainted with the Palouse.

I was pretty much right in my memory of the Palouse Highway. Not ideal -- lots of loud, fast traffic. But it has a nice shoulder and serves as a good arterial to many back roads and dotted lines.

I've not taken a ride beyond 15 miles or so for at least a month, maybe longer. So I decided that Friday would be a longer ride. And I would ride south.

I wake up and it is 23F. If I wait a while -- take my time packing a lunch, have coffee, read the paper, have another coffee -- then it may warm up a bit. It does. By 10AM it is 25F and I have fussed all I can.

I ride a couple miles and begin to rethink my ride. I'm warm, but I just feel so slow and heavy. I'm wishing for gears, but I'm riding fixed today. I'm carrying extra gear because it is so cold: an extra wool shirt and neck gator; my jetboil; a liter of water; an extra hotcup of ginger-water. Plus, I have a lock in my front bag, along with lunch and the other crap that finds its way into my bag. And of course my tool kit. A lot of crud... I am planning on a 5 hour ride in sub-freezing temperatures and I want to be prepared for it. The weight is worth the piece of mind.

As I pass Luna's Bakery, I notice both of my friends are working, so I stop by and said hey. My buddy Joe gives me some input on my route and suggests a couple cool roads. He had driven all these roads during high school with his buddies.

I pedal on a couple more miles to the Palouse Highway. The wind is sharp. I also don't want to listen to the traffic; I need quiet. So I pull on to Ben Burr road instead.

Most of my day rides share the same goal: to find some dirt roads that I've not ridden before. I head up Ben Burr road thinking of this goal. I've been down Ben Burr before. But I remember wanting to check out "Willow Springs Road." It's just a couple miles south. More climbing and Willow Springs leads me to Big Rock Road.

Big Rock Road is a fine dirt road that goes straight up for about a mile. I enjoy the first of 2 long walks as I push my bike up the steep grade. I am rewarded at the top: Big Rock levels out and curves it's way around the side of a mountain; the icy-cold winter views are stunning as I look out across Spokane to the north and the Palouse to the south.

I end up popping out on the Palouse and immediately find another road that I've wondered about: Weger Road. Like any good road, this too starts out with a mile-long walk up a steep hill. The reward on Weger is a long, rolling stroll through the Palouse on frozen dirt roads. The wind is still fiercely cold. Luckily, among the crap in my bag was a pair of sunglasses. Without them I'd be tearing up from the constant cold wind.

I enjoy lunch on Valley Chapel Road, amid high school memories of driving out Valley Chapel to go to "the bridge" and swim.

Lunch is soup: bullion cube with mushrooms, spinach, chopped onions and some dehydrated sun-dried tomatoes. All brought to a boil in an instant in the Jetboil. What a great device the Jetboil is. I also have some caponata; my Sicilian mother-in-law makes this for me. I can't get enough of it. I'll document it sometime because it is the perfect cycling food. Bread, banana, and a hard-boiled egg complete the lunch. Bumble bar for emergency. In this weather, a warm lunch is such a huge treat. I also keep my hotcup full of hot water -- I have a piece of crushed fresh ginger in the hotcup too. This makes for a nice flavor and guards against stomach troubles.

As I finish lunch, it starts to snow. It's coming down lightly and swirling in the wind. By the time I arrive in downtown Spokane, the snow is coming down harder and I'm glad to be getting home. Thanks to the chemical foot warmers and my wool I am never freezing. But I am cold. The ride only turned out to be about 3 hours and about 30 miles, but I found a couple new roads and found a way to enjoy the cold weather. Map of route is on bikely.com.