"I feel like one gnarly bitch!"

Fort Valley Trail, April 30, 2005

Antoinette and Jeff

Ah, nothing like a nice bike ride in the mud to turn a mild-mannered librarian into the tough talking trail rat who pronounced the title above, after a long and muddy descent. There wasn't too much picture-taking on this ride; we were working more on keeping the line on wet roads and trails.

We have finally talked Antoinette into getting clipless pedals, and today was her first adventure with them. I rode over to her place and helped her with her first clip-in. Here she is, on an especially dangerous and exposed section of trail, figuring out how to make it work. After some practice spinning up and down the local road, we set forth for the mud.

We took Forest road 164B out to the Snowbowl road, and then came back into town on the Fort Valley trail. Here's Antoinette heading out on the forest road. The road is not unrideable, but the general muddy slog is obvious from the picture. For most of it, though, we were able to find fairly firm tracks. Shortly after I took this picture, we pulled off to watch an oncoming gentleman demonstrate, with help from his expertly elevated pickup, why most of the forest roads are closed to vehicular traffic right now.

There is a lot more snow at 7,800' than at 7,300' after the storm that came through on Thursday the 28th. Fort Valley trail is rideable -- it has some puddles and mud, but is not quite the kind of soggy mess that bike tires tear up. We took a break at the intersection of the trail and FR 9002. The picture below shows me doing what I do best (taking a break). We were running out of time with afternoon commitments looming, so we had to bail and take the fast way down the FR, where (1) the mud was flying off the wheels, and (2) Antoinette suffered a major clipless pedal event in a puddle.

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