Fixing a flat

Maddie just got 1st in her cross country meet. This is a happy tube repair moment.

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More info on cyclist accident

The guy who got in an accident on Monday is Matthew. I talked to his sister, Katherine, this morning. She has spent the last 40 hours in ICU and was exhausted, shocked, and heart broken.

It's unlikely that Matthew will recover from his injuries. He's got extensive spinal and brain damage. Katherine has been instructed to gather family quickly.

It's one thing to sit and armchair accidents. It's quite another to be in one and it's quite another to meet, face-to-face, the loved ones of victims who are struggling to make sense of it all.

I'll lay out what I learned here.

- Matthew worked at the new Apple store. He was on his way to work.

- According to a witness Matthew was "flying down the hill." Based on Katherine's discussions with the "investigators," this is the single piece of evidence that makes this a closed case. (I can't stand it; I have to editorialize a bit here: to most car-people, I would submit that a cyclist going 25 MPH is "flying." But of course I wasn't there.)

- The driver, who had an expired license, was not ticketed. He stopped. Then he pulled in front of Matthew, who was unable to stop in time to avoid a collision.

- There are bicycle tire skid marks that indicate Matthew tried to stop.

- According to Katherine, Matthew was a "real" cyclist: he always wore a helmet, he was not a "sidewalk rider." He followed the rules.

- Katherine made the mistake of looking on the Spokesman-Review for information on the event. The poorly described accident scene (which implies it was rider error) coupled with the typical vitriolic, uninformed remarks of the SR commenters made the horrific event even worse.

- She mentioned that the investigating officer said that there were some "bike advocates at the scene who were doing their own investigation" and who were going to "put up a white bike." If this is you or your buddies, please contact me. She's very interested in learning anything new, especially finding other witnesses.

I have to wonder how the SPD "investigation" would be different if this were a car-car accident with such an awful result. There's so much to say here.

Cyclist hit on 4th and Lincoln

Map link

(Yesterday a bunch of police cars were going haywire outside my office window -- hanging u turns in the middle of traffic, speeding down Sprague at 50 mph, etc -- so I fired up the online police scanner to get the news. I missed it. But I left the scanner on. At about 1:30 or so I heard a dispatcher say that a car/bike accident happened at 4th and Monroe. That's the back story on why I was listening to a scanner, which I never do, but I can see why bored people do)


The fact is, is that the cyclist was hit at 4th and Lincoln. Which makes a lot more sense given the fact that the dispatcher mentioned that the cyclist was bleeding from the head. A friend of mine in the EMT world confirmed that it was a high-impact hit, based on the bleeding and the fact that the cyclist also lost a shoe.

I ride into downtown all the time on Lincoln. The place where this cyclist was hit is in one of two scary intersections. I wasn't there. I don't know the details, but based on gong down this hill at least 3 times a week for the last six years or so, I can take stab at what I think happened.

It's easy to get to speed as you round the corner on 7th Ave and shoot down Lincoln street. In fact, the hill drops off quickly between 7th and 5th and 6th street doesn't cross, so a quick scan to 6th let's you off the hook for a block. By the time you get to 5th, it's easy to be going 35+ mph if you're just mildly braking. To do so, however, is pretty crazy.

Deaconess Hospital is a huge sprawling Death Star of a structure, with it's multiple buildings, parking lots, sky bridges, etc. The epicenter of this activity is at 5th and Lincoln. The emergency center is there, there's a huge parking garage, the doctor's parking garage, a giant medical building on each side of the street, and the Shriners Children's Hospital.

There are stop signs at 5th for traffic crossing Lincoln, which is a two-lane, one-way street heading north. So going through 5th and Lincoln on a bike at 30+ mph is not something I do, unless I am shadowing a car that is descending down the hill and I'm clearly visible to that descending car. In that case - I use the car as a shield and enjoy the descent.

But in the normal case, I take it easy and slow a bit for both the 5th and the 4th crossings. It seems that just about every time I go down this hill, there's a creeper -- if you're a cyclist, you know the type -- they're looking you right in the eye and slowly creeping out. I've found that just because they're looking you right in the eye doesn't actually mean that they see you -- or if they do, they see you as a slow bike, not a guy traveling 30 mph straight in their line of travel. Anyway, I always shake my head "no" at these guys. And I assume that they'll go.

But god knows that there's many many cases on Lincoln where I am enjoying the descent and easily could've been taken out by a creeper or a phone talker or just a bad driver. I hope this guy isn't someone I know. And in any case, I hope he's ok.

Civia Kingfield

The folks at Surly/QBP/Civia are on fire. First, it was the Halstead cycle truck, now they've got another interesting urban bike in the hopper: the Kingfield.

I really like the looks of this bike. Their blog is agonizingly short on the detail I really want to know (how fat can the tires get? what's the basic HA/SA geometry? what kind of steel? component spec would be nice) -- but from 100 ft, this bike looks promising.

I like the idea of a belt drive. I like not worrying about grease on me or oiling the damn chain. I like not replacing the chain or the cogs. Ever! My understanding is that the belt is similar (or is?) the same as some kind of pulley in your car -- if that's the case, it may require changing on a bike every 2nd generation or so. That's what I'm talking about.

The fidelity of the picture doesn't let me see how they replace/remove the belt drive. On other bikes, an expensive little S&S coupler is brazed into the chain stay. There's something going on there on the Kingfield chain stay, but I can't tell what it is.

The parts look reasonable; though the front fender is silly in its shortness for an urban bike. Speaking of fenders, I wish they took a tad more care in placing the seat stay bridge to get proper fender alignment. You can poo-poo such observations as effete, but fender placement is more than aesthetic; in this case, it may crowd the fender/tire and will be the pinch point for putting fatter tires on there with a fender (You can see that well-illustrated on my Trek 720).

Anyway, from the looks of the Kingfield pic, my guess is 32mm + fenders is as big as it gets, though those might be 35's.

I love that they are manufacturing a bar-end shifter for the Nexus 8-speed. The J-tek is great and all but availability has been spotty and it's a pretty expensive bit of hardware. I'm guessing with the big Q behind development, Civia will be able to get a bar-end out for about half the price, and hopefully it'll be in the QBP catalog.

Of course the fork is not my style, but it's cheap and it's the style these days so whatever. The rear rack is riding way too high, which is weird since Civia manufactures both the rack and the bike -- I'd assume they would get that dialed in a bit better.

All that bitching and moaning about these minor aesthetic issues aside: this could be a great commuter and trail rider for some. Internal hubs and drop bars are a good combo and belt drive, with a sludge catcher is pretty sweet... at $1300 with rack/fenders -- not an awful price either. In any case, it's something to get excited about in that we have thought, design, and manufacturing going into smart urban bikes (that aren't just more copies of "Amsterdam bikes") from a big player in the bike world.

Now, we just need a bike shop in Spokane that has a few of these (and some LHTs, Halsteads, Salsas, etc) on the floor next Spring.

Ride report: Davis Lake loop, Colville Nat'l Forest

As promised, here's the story.

All the pictures in this post were taken by Patrick, of Scoop fame, with his fancy new camera.

Our goal was to get out into the Colville Nat'l Forest and explore on Friday day and then stay at my family's place on the Kettle River. The family place on the Kettle River is in the epicenter of tons of great riding within the Nat'l Forest and Nat'l Recreation areas -- so it's silly that I don't base camp more often there to explore the neighborhood.


After spending a bit of time attempting to map out routes in both the Couer d'Alene and Colville National Forests, we've figured some stuff out. I'm using the royal "we" here: loosely: Pat, Alex, me.

One pain in the arse about riding in National Forests is that generally you are following old logging roads, which were not optimized to provide connectivity in a predictable and gridlike fashion. Add to that the fact that there's just not a single good authoritative online map for most of these areas. The best I've found is the OpenStreetMap data set.

Anyway, here's the route we took. The OSM dataset had the "jeep trail" connection that we needed between two well-known Forest Service roads. Transferring the OSM route to a Garmin-happy gpx file is done with a funny and hack-feeling, but quick and painless process from Elsewhere.org. OSM + Elsewhere.org = good stuff for this kind of riding/exploring.


Wow. That's some preamble. We've not even gotten to the ride yet. Get a cup of coffee or tankard of ale or whatever it takes. Here we go.

We left Spokane at about 9am. We got to the Kettle Family Property at about 11 am. We wasted no time in hopping on our bikes and being on our way.

A word on the bikes. All bikes were rigid. Patrick's is a sweet-ass mid-90's Scott mountain bike with Prestige tubing and Suntour XC Pro bits. Just a great bike. He runs an Epic frame pack to haul his water bladder and other stuff.

I was on the Rawland. I have a blog post brewing about how amazingly righteous the Quasi-moto tires are on that bike. I've been running the Neo's on there for a year or so and the Quasi's are just completely hands down faster better radder and totally transform the bike. I can totally live with the turdy tubing when running those tires.



Jon was on his Kogswell city bike: running full fenders, double-crank with 8 speed. Kickstand. Front rack. Cityfied hard slick tires. I told him the Kogs would be fine for this ride, since we were on logging roads -- I wish I would've not said that and let him fix the broken wheel on his mountain bike, which has a proper triple/low gear set up and a front shock. But whatever -- he underbiked with gusto and nary a word of complaint. Good egg that Jon.

We tooled down Highway 395 for about 5 miles then pulled off on some tiny overgrown old road that ruled. Instantly I was happy and satisfied, which meant that I didn't shut up about it and I just started hammering to see what would come next. Typical.

This was a minor climb, but it had some sand that made life a bit difficult for Jon. He held up and pushed through the hard bits.

We ended up popping out Boulder pass road -- and did another 3-4 miles of paved climbing. Easy and fun and I almost no traffic.

From there we hopped onto a proper Forest Service road that climbed gently for about 5-6 miles. It was an amazingly beautiful fall perfect piece of riding. I think the temp was about 70F, many of the leaves were turning, and conversation was easy as we trotted up the hill.



We then turned onto a minor road and started a bit more steeper climb. At this point, we passed the nicest camp I think I've ever seen. Clearly a hunter's camp that was left ready to roll for the next party: log recliner complete with bailing-twine webbing, a real out-house, cooking grill (with dry wood shavings, paper, and kindling covered and ready), and other accouterments of civil camping. I tagged that one on the old GPS.

Then came the climb. So here's a fun thing: at some point in the last few weeks I turned off the tracking function on my GPS. That sucks, because I was really looking forward to coming back and viewing the elevation profile of this part:

Nothing quanitfies and bloggifies the suffering that a climb can inflict like a good old-fashion-gps-generated elevation profile. Dang it all to heck! Let me tell you it was f'ing steep! Really.

It was silly. It was about 1200 feet in about a mile. We pushed our bikes up almost the whole way. While it sucks to push your bike, it does feel good to sweat like we did.

Once we got to about 4200 feet, we rode the "Thomson Ridge" to Davis Lake. At Davis Lake, we refilled water and looked at a couple frogs. At this point it was about 3:30. I was hoping to be back down on Highway 395 by 5pm or so.


Turns out, with the exception of about a 1/2 mile climb out of the lake to the main road, the rest of the way to 395 was downhill. It was a great descent, and would make a great climb. There are nice gentle grades, fierce switchy-backy rocky bits, long fast steep sections with roll outs and gentle arcs, and stretches of rocky-technical-minor-washout-shit-road. Great stuff.

Jon had to take it easy on the Kogswell, since it was running slicks, so he was not as enthusiastic about the descent as Patrick and I were.


After the climb, we humped it back 5 miles or so to the Barstow Shit Shop and Junk Food Store and loaded up on beer and junk food. All up, we did a 35 mile loop with about 6500 feet of climbing and were pretty tired.

We sat on the lawn looking over the Kettle River, ate crappy food, drank beers, started a fire, and carried on until about 9pm -- where we slept under the stars and listened to the coyotes.

Just lovely.

Colville Nat'l Forest

Better pics and ride report forthcoming.

Outbound

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