Art in the Boonies

Sometimes when flying into Spokane (from Seattle), the landing approach requires the pilot to loop the plane around the West Plains, over the Northside and to the airport. Whenever I fly over the SFCC/Gov't Way/Rimrock area, I see this little dirt road just west of the MegaChurch on Gov't Way. The road is parallel to Gov't Way, then cuts west under the railroad. I just flew in from Seattle last week and saw this curious little road and tunnel again and decided that I would go find it on my next ride-about.

Ben and I found it this morning. We found all sorts of cool things. I used to ride around the Greenwood Cemetery years ago when I was a mountain biker guy. I'd forgotten a lot of the trails and cemetery paths until we got back on them today.

The cemetery is huge. We rode all around the western side of the cemetery, which climbs up towards rim rock. Ben said it was like riding in the Twilight Zone, there are little roads and paths and patches of cemetery winding all over the hill side. We got lost in minor little ways a couple times. With all the dead folks laying around there and the little roads and paths, it was a little disorientating.

At a western part there was a cool old bridge that crosses the deep railroad tracks. This gets you out of the cemetery and into some fun, steep, rocky single-track climbs. If you follow the trail downward, you pop out at the tunnel that I spied from the plane.

The tunnel has a bunch of art spray painted on it. Clearly, when a good tagger has time to spend on a piece, their work is can be really nice. And the setting is kind of nice too. Being out in the boonies, where all access roads are blocked by gates, makes for a pleasant viewing.

Continuing through the tunnel (heading east/NE) you pop out at the Evergreen Archery Club. Cool. That road, which is gated, pops you out at Houston/Colville road. Which pops you out right across from the Centennial Trail access there at that little military cemetery.

Looking at Google Maps -- the trail that cuts under the tracks is named Park Road. That "road" has not seen a car for some time.

Anyway, this was a good ride-about: dirt roads; some trails; pavement; closed roads. And I saw a couple other opportunities for future exploration.

I Found Another One!

Another Spokane cycling blog debuted today. This is great.

I know this guy too! He was also a commuter guy that I followed -- just last week. His name is Taylor and I made the mistake of showing up to follow him on a fixed gear. His commute (of course) includes the Post hill climb. And of course he's a real cyclist: fast and fit, so I nearly had a heart attack staying with him as he casually strolled up the hill ahead of me. And I'm pretty sure he was being kind and going slow for me.

Anyway, he's got 2 posts... enough for a link in my book.

Check it out: http://elephantpilotmessengers.blogspot.com/.

A New Spokane Cycling Blog!

Corner of Meenach Dr and NW Blvd at 6 AM this morning

Yay! Add another local bike blog to your favorites. And I know the guy. Jason is a commuter that I met on the BAB commuter project. He's been hanging out at the P2P garage building up a beater on a trial run to see if the project makes sense. So far it does.

Anyway, his blog is http://www.100km.us, and so far it's interesting.

At Least I'll be a Warm Nerd

A few posts ago, I mentioned that the hipsters are coming. I've been reading the Bike Snob NYC blog every day and loving it. It's been making me think about cycling as yet another American form of group-think "unique"fashion expression, and how I'm just as caught up as the hipsters that are routinely kicked around on his blog.

So one of the many cycling stereotypes/groups the guy (at least I think it's a guy) picks on are guys that wear SPD sandals with wool socks. It feels like a personal attack each time I read it, but he's totally on the money in his stereotyping, with me and with the other groups he skewers, so it all evens out.

Anyway. I may have crossed the ultimate threshold of geeky nerdiness with my latest fix. I'm kind of resolute about not buying fancy/expensive SPD winter boots. Mainly, because I can't find the ones I want (Lake) in stock here. I've actually not looked that hard. The core issue here is that my feet are fat and cycling shoes are notoriously narrow. Therefore, I must try on any SPD boots before buying them. I don't want to order them, return them, and fuss. And they start at like $200. So, unless a pair lands in my lap for a song, I'm going to make these damn sandals work in the winter.

This will be my third winter trying to get them dialed in.

So far, the best I've done is about 1/2 hour at 20F or so. It's actually the mid-30's-wet-but-not-snowing scenario that kills me. The picture on the right was a fix I tried about 80 miles out of Spokane in that scenario last year. My toes froze the whole way home. It sucked.

When it's 20F or so, I'll just put on my big-ass boots and ride the turd or something else with platforms. I've worn "SealSkinz," which are waterproof socks, over thin woolies, but there are two problems with this:

1. SealSkinz rule at keeping moisture out, but they don't breath at all. So, my toes sweat, then freeze solid.

2. If I wear any kind of wool sock thicker than the thinnest of liners, the straps on my sandals pop off at the toes from all the bulk.

So, now that Liza is working for REI, I ponied up for some fancy Gortex socks. With the family discount, I got them for about $35. I also bought some nylon webbing and a couple buckles. The plan is to wear a thicker wool sock with these fancy Gortex socks and the sandals. I sewed the extra buckle onto the sandal to keep them from popping open.

The buckle works great. I'm really curious to see how the thicker wool/Gortex outer sock works.

The forcast for Friday shows a low of 35F with rain -- sounds perfect. I'll have to take a nice long ride in the morning and see how long it takes to freeze my toes. I'll be sure to report back on this exciting experiment.

Alex's Kogswell P/R

This is Alex's Kogswell P/R prototype. I was never crazy about this bike. But now, with the front rack on there, and my having ridden it a few times over a variety of surfaces, I like it. This bike is modeled on a Rene Herse (not, Singer -- thanks Alex) bike from the 50's. It's got a similar geometry to the 1983 Trek, which I think, was modeled on the same Herse bike. But that's just conjecture.

The rack is just super handy. This bike has a front-end geometry that is optimized for loads on the front rack -- it's got low trail. I believe the trail on this bike is 40mm. The low trail is really the defining characteristic of this bike. When I borrow this bike, I commute around the Redmond/Bellevue area. I put my messenger bag (containing a laptop and other small stuff -- 15 lbs?) on the rack and secure the bag with a bungee net. It's nice to carry a load up front, where you can see it, where it's accessible, and where -- on a properly designed bike -- the load doesn't screw the handling, but instead, seems to improve it.

A previous version of this post claimed that Alex built the rack. Actually: Alex and Alistair Spence designed this rack, which fits over a Nitto mini front rack. Alistair built it. Alex has since built a couple/few racks and plans to build more.

I've got a rack in his queue; he's going to build me one that is the same platform-size as the rack in the picture, but it will connect to the mid-fork braze-ons. It'll go on my Trek, which essentially the same bike as the P/R, but with standard gauge/diameter tubing instead of oversized.

Rollin with P2P

The big P2P organizational meeting was yesterday. Watch the P2P blog for updates around what became of that meeting. After the meeting we had a potluck and took a ride.

Liza

Mike and Ken

Ben. Not sure what hurts my eyes more: the hair or the coat?

Transportation Summit

I went to a Inland NW Transportation Summit for a bit this morning. Yow. A look at the "sponsored by" sign and it's obvious these folks are not the bike facilities types.

In fact, a couple times speakers (including the Deputy Assitant Secretary, US DOT -- Robert DeHaan) talked about "getting real results... not wasting money on bike paths..." Kudos to Gordon Black, Director of BAW, who called out the Deputy on the error of his ways, not to mention his logic; which went basically like this: "bike facilities are a waste of money when it comes to relieving congestion. No one rides a bike, no one is going to ride a bike. It's too dangerous and there are no bike paths..." I wish I were making that up.

The basic thrust of the conference was: how can we find more money to build more giant transportation/freight projects so we can move stuff all over the world? It was sort of surreal to sit in a room with 200+ people who all believe that it's a good thing that when you go to McDonalds in South Korea, the fries you're eating are from Washington. That such an unsustainable model, completely reliant on cheap oil is something we should all be rallying behind and finding gobs and gobs of money to build out. It would be interesting for Maddie to watch this conference on a DVD when she's my age.

I stuck around for the "Personal Mobility" break-out session, hoping to find some talk about cycling or at least mass transit. The first 40 minutes was "how do we find money for the N/S freeway." Apparently, the project is broke. It needs like $150 million/year for the next 20 years to finish it. There was a lot of hand-wringing and carrying-on about how important this corridor is for Spokane and the economy and it's bigger than Spokane: it's regional! And it has a bike path baked into it! I had my hand raised to suggest making it a toll road, but there were a lot of heavies in the room (Chris Marr, Gregoire's assistant, Alex Wood, some cranky Republican who suggested -- of course -- privatizing it and taking the "Seattle Ferry money" to fund our freeway) so I was not called upon. The last guy they called on did suggest tolls.

That was it for me. I think they went on to talk about the potential for light rail b/t Spokane and CdA, but I'd had enough. I'm just not cut out for the frustration that is hand-wavey "input." I took off and took a nice ride down Sprague, went to Vien Dong's and picked up lunch, and ate with Jon Snyder in his office.