Bad Decision Bicyclist

Just finished what is easily in the running for my best day of skiing ever. 

I've literally been planning this thing for years. We lucked out in that an access road is plowed this winter, cutting several miles off the trip. It was possible to complete this in about 9 hours instead of requiring an overnight.

And it was even better than I expected, despite spring-like conditions. 

What? No, Utah is next week. 

And as much as that costs it better be completely mindblowing when I've got this in my backyard:

Oh yeah, we also had another fatbike race on Saturday.  This one was on some trails I'm very familiar with at MTU. That, combined with the big ring on my Pugs (something a lot of fatbikes don't have) let me beat quite a few people who normally finish far ahead of me.  Sadly though, this was just an all out hammerfest, completely redlined the entire duration of the race, which kind of gets away from what I like about fatbiking.  But the organizers agree that throwing in some singletrack next year sounds like a good idea, so this race has some potential.  

That's what it means when I come in 47th at the Noquemanon Snowbike World Championships, right? 

So yeah, it's a good thing my folks came into town to say hi, otherwise I never would have made it past L'Anse. Apparently they got pounded with nearly 18" of snow the night before. 

What? No, I would not have skipped a bike race to go skiing!

I, um.... don't like to drive in the snow.  Yeah, that's it.  

But hey, it was cool to say hi to all the Marquette peeps and check out all the snowbikes.  Lots of stock Mukluks and Pugsleys, but also a lot of cool, customized rides. Even amongst the horribly uncool folks like like me without a totally custom setup, it's nearly impossible to find two bikes alike (check out my red cables, yo!) 

But hey, it's race start time- everybody line up! 

Now ok, I'll admit it. I'm not really very good at this snowbiking thing. I'm totally squirrelly. I spin out a lot. I go shooting across the trail in weird directions without warning. I like to crash a lot.  And I'm slow. Real slow. 

So I took a nice conservative spot towards the back and didn't dive into the melee at the start. Which is a good thing. Because we immediately started making sharp right turns before getting to a stretch of ungroomed soft snow.   Where we all had to jump off our bikes and start running....

...and running...

...and running... 

...I guess it's a bike race in that, yes- I am pushing my bicycle. Nobody ever said anything about riding it. 

There was one stretch that wasn't so bad, but man- nearly the entire first half of the course was basically unrideable. But hey, it was beautiful day, and we got to hikeabike past some stuff that looked like it might be good fun to come back and ski.

But then, finally- the course went from unrideable to perfectly groomed, nearly entirely downhill racetrack, packed in even more by the 50-odd people in front of me. 

Holy man. It's a good thing those ski trails are wide, I was going faster than I'd go on my mountain bike in the summer. I went flying past maybe 6 people in the last 7k and finished just behind a 7th for 47th out of 67 people.   And I thought I'd never use the big ring on my Pugs... 

Hung out at the finish hoping to score a new set of tires in the raffle, but no dice. Had a couple hours of daylight to kill on the way back home, so stopped off to check out a potential route into some new ski terrain we've been eyeing up and get my favorite kind of fatbiking in- exploring new territory while taking in the natural beauty of the UP.

First fatbike race, coming up this weekend!

And that's pretty much how I feel about. 

The concept of a contest of speed without irony on a fatbike is, well, rather comical.  But they sure are fun to ride in groups and it beats sitting inside. So that's why I do it. 

But it does not beat good skiing though.  Introduced a few friends to the secret Twin Lakes stash. They made it look easy.  





But I think I crossed some kind of skiing threshold this weekend.  This whole "season" I've been amped up like some kind of crack addict looking for a fix.

Dawn Patrol!
Scrape every last inch of powder off the local hill!
Backcountry tours!
XC skiing like it's a methadone hit!
SKI SKI SKI!
Ski 'til you DIE!

Saturday night, I barely had the energy left to drink a beer before hitting the sack at 9pm. And then getting up and skiing all day Sunday.

Well, the monkey has apparently been fed.

4-8" of heavy fresh snow last night and I went home and shoveled my roof like a motherfucking adult (well, OK- I forgot my kneepads).

Another 4-8" of lighter powder overnight and I wasn't racing out the door at 5am to dodge trees in the dark.

I raced out the door at 6am instead to get to work early so I can leave early (lifts don't start until 3pm anyway...).

Progress, not perfection.

So last weekend, after avalanche training we went out to check out our secret backcountry stash.

Turned out to be in pretty good shape with several inches of fluff on top of a very solid base. 

Hills were climbed.

Turns were had.

Refreshments were served.


One of the nice things about the aforementioned secret backcountry stash is it's proximity to the Parkview Inn in Twin Lakes. So we stopped off just in case the previous refreshments didn't take. 

So we're hanging out, doing the bar thing, talking about how awesome it would be to have one's own personal Tucker Sno Cat. Some waitress looks over at us, and immediately starts heading our direction, talking about how boring the day has been and she should maybe just sit at the bar and have a beer.  She gets within a couple feet of us, ready to saddle up at the bar and then just turns around and leaves.   Tele 'til yer smelly. 

At least the bartender said we were "civilized".   

I'M THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED SKIER ON THE COVER OF THE DAILY MINING GAZETTE!(*)





(*)How many G.N.A.R. points do I get for this, anyway? I hope enough to cover my awesome yard sale moments after that first picture.

Hola, amigos. What's up? I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but things have been pretty crazy around Rancho BDB.

See, after my crash, the combination of lack of daylight and shitty weather was keeping me from getting out and doing much at all. The cabin fever set in bad. Worst case I've ever had in years.  On a trip downstate just before thanksgiving, I actually paid $80 for a new cassette for the Hoss just so I didn't miss an opportunity to ride Hanson Hills.  I was positively climbing the walls. I even booked a trip out to Utah for Feb. just so I had an opportunity to get out of the house to look forward to. 

Late November and early December continued the trend of crappy weather conditions. Never really made a complete transition from fall to winter. I was able to feed the monkey a bit by getting out on skate skis for some XC action, but honestly- I'm just not that excited about skate skiing anymore. Not really a whole lot of new things to explore or adventures to be had. It's always the same trails, all the time.   But damn, it's a hell of a workout. And the hills on the tech trails can be pretty fun when trying to tele-turn a pair of skate skis.  

But without any crazy weekend adventures, the cabin fever continued unabated.... 

Until a lot of my friends started buying fat bikes. I've always wanted a fat bike. Stuff like this and this and this do absolutely nothing to discourage me.  But the $1600 price tag always did.  

Well, after it became readily apparent we wouldn't have any good backcountry skiing until the end of December at best, I just decided to hell with it. I would get a fatbike, no matter the cost.

Conveniently, a friend was upgrading to an even fatter bike and had a barely used one for sale. Still the most expensive bike I've ever purchased, but much less than $1600. 

And let me tell you, if you ride bikes off pavement at all and have any taste for adventure riding- go buy one NOW.  Don't make excuses, rationalizations, or what have you. It's a real game changer for winter exploration. Stuff that has been out of reach during the winter is now accessible. And plus they're just silly fun to ride no matter what.  

In the past few weeks we've been riding the bandit snowmobile trails around Calumet, the XC skiing and snowmobile trails of the Porcupine Mountains, doing 30 mile treks along the edges of the Huron Mountains and even riding up (mostly) frozen rivers in Duluth. 

Crazy, crazy fun. I almost don't even care that the backcountry skiing has been almost non existent as of late.  

 


 


 


 


 

With LSPR behind me, I was finally getting back into my fitness groove.  Backcountry skiing is tough, in that it requires good lungs and the ability to bounce off things well, so going into the season in good shape is really important.  

This year was tough.  

A couple of key organizers decided to take a long deserved break and the rest of us had to step up to take up the slack.  This had me doing a lot more organizer type things in addition to my regular rallymaster duties. Mostly this involved calling people on the phone and asking them for things. I hate sales.  But what are you gonna do?

Not ride your bike much and get incredibly stressed out it seems. 

Plus, I've kind of had a bad attitude about the sport of rally as of late. It seems I hear no end of bitching every time I try to include a cool two track stage or we don't finish in time for people to get to the bar. Add in the spiraling cost of competition that's driven away many of my friends and I was convinced that the sport was largely being overtaken by a bunch of dandies. 

Usually, my duties start to wind down a bit the week before the rally, and if I've done my job right, I can start to enjoy the event. Not so this year. I immediately had to switch into the Chief of Communications hat and recruit about 25 qualified radio operators, set up a net control station, and figure out how to run a net for a rally.  My buddy Dave saved my ass in countless ways on this one- getting me the local ham contacts, setting us up in the CCRAA radio shack for net control and generally bringing a lot of expertise and equipment that I am sorely lacking in. 

So there I am, Friday morning of the rally, already way behind on sleep and I just want to get through it as quickly as possible so I can go up to Copper Harbor, ride my bike, and get my new kayak. And then never ever organize another rally again.

We kind of got tossed into the fire on net control, but we were figuring it out.  Casual comments from previous net control operators got us moving in the correct direction and horrendous weather conditions out on the stages were keeping spectator and civilian problems at bay.

And then, finally- on the last stage of the night, we had or first "problem".  Car zero came back and said we should just skip it.  It sounded like the stage was passable, but very very muddy.  Unable to come up with a suitable plan to navigate the cars back to service, I agreed to transit the stage. Car zero came back and said if I'm going to send them down it, I might as well let them compete. There may have been some egging on by a long time competitor working the finish control too.  Go ahead and run it...

I think I can safely use the word "epic" here.  6 cars off, nearly a quarter of the remaining field. Stories of one particular driver who was giving a full on, 11/10ths driving performance when his co-driver looked over and told him he was doing upwards of 25mph.  And comments like "Sorry, no car count- our log sheets have disintegrated in the rain." It took a while, but we got everybody out of the woods safely. I was back at the hotel and in bed by 4am, but couldn't sleep. I was stoked! Finally, rally was cool again.  It was an epic battle of will against the elements! Forget winning, just getting through those conditions was an accomplishment worth celebrating. Here was rally's chance to prove it's mettle to me... 

We certainly had our challenges the next day, including a stuck transmitter that forced us to transit a stage and do an emergency frequency change, but we had mastered the basic routine of getting a stage up and running. We even made it down to the banquet to catch the last few scraps of food on the buffet (not that we need it, Dave's wife was feeding us pretty well that whole weekend).

During the awards ceremony, rally made me proud. Everybody agreed it was a horrendous, difficult night. But the attitude was, "that's what makes this cool". I didn't hear a single complaint about running that last stage.  Spent the night drinking beer, shaking hands, thanking the people on the ground that made net control so much easier for us, and talking about "next year!".

Kind of an exciting weekend for staring at this for nearly 40 hours straight:

Half price kayak rentals all through september at the Keweenaw Adventure Company!

I won't delve too deep into it, but man... the rally is just killing me this year. 

So I was really, really looking forward to a weekend off to head over to Duluth to race 100 miles of the Minnesota Arrowhead's finest gravel  in this year's Heck of the North. 

This summer though, I finally dialed in the perfect rack setup on the ol' Jake and I'm reluctant to strip it down for 'cross season and gravel road racing again. I've got a Salsa Fargo frame waiting to get built up, but funding has not been approved as of yet. So I did the rational thing and threw some drop bars on my single speed mountain bike. Sure, I have all of two 'cross races under my belt with this setup, but all my fellow alt/hipster, beer swilling, beard sporting, single speed riders agree, it's a pretty sweet setup. So it must be perfect for a gravel road race.  Did I mention I left the 32x17 gearing on it? And the 29x2.55 tires?  This not unlike entering a rally in a one ton diesel truck on 44" super swampers. And then leaving the transfer case in low range.... 

The start went well, if you call "well" getting completely and utterly dropped.  Hard. Seems 32x17 ain't much good for anything above 15mph.  But who cares? It's a beautiful day on the north shore of Superior in prime color season.  Why rush through it? 

I was having a grand old time, kibitzing with my fellow riders, enjoying the day, and then we hit the first snowmobile trail section.  The Heck is unique amongst gravel road races in that it throws in these 1 mile sections that are damn near impossible to ride through completely.  But my monstercross setup could ride a lot more than most people, and faster too!  So I found myself passing a lot of people.  Hoo boy, looks like I'm racing. 

After that first snowmobile section, I made my big bad decision. I found myself riding with a couple of guys, pushing 16-17mph. Definitely on the high end of my cadence abilities, but manageable.  Or so it seemed. 

So I came screaming into the halfway checkpoint with them and suddenly realized what I had done.  My legs felt like lead. No other way to describe it. I've never had my legs feel like this. I could still mash, but just couldn't get them to spin at any decent cadence. 

So for the next 35 miles or so, I was kind of riding my own ride. Doing the recovery thing. Singing to myself. Have you seen the new Powderwhores trailer? As per usual, I like the song. In this case, "Bugs" by O'Death. Which means I watched their video.   



Which is kind of creepy.  And seems to be shot someplace along the Heck of the North course.  I was always half expecting one of these weird woods people to be standing back in the trees as I rode past. 

But the next person I saw was my teammate, Bruce at about mile 90. I sort of dropped him for a little bit, but realized I had nothing to really try and prove in this race.  Singlespeed with a low gear had kicked my ass hard and merely finishing was something to be happy about.  So I rode (and walked up Pleasant View Road- man, that road was not named by a bicyclist!) the last few miles in with him to the finish. 

Oddly enough, I finished 15 minutes earlier than last year. 

The Heck continues to be my favorite gravel road race ever.  Just can't beat the setting and some of the unique challenges of it. It's a tough time of year for me fitness wise with work and rally responsibilities, so it's a real challenge too. But now I'm intrigued by this single speed thing. I wonder what I could do with a bigger gear?