Blue Hills Mountainbike ride and Toys Drive 10 am-1 pm Sunday, Dec 2

It's that time of year again!!
Join DCR, TrailWatch, and SEMASS NEMBA in our annual  Toys Drive. It's
a great way to share with the local community and help a child in need 
of some holiday excitement!
Of course the seasonal (warm)refreshments and confections will be on
hand, as well as a toasty bonfire courtesy the DCR rangers, and plenty
of riding to do. We'll even put together a kids ride if you bring 
'em....rumour has it that Santa will be making an appearance....... 

DCR also has a group hike planned at 1 pm for all ages/levels.
We'll plan on a couple of social group rides starting out at 10:30, so
layer up and come out for the festivities!
Please bring an unwrapped toy/gift for a child (any age, but gifts for older, 11-16 year olds, are needed also) to the Houghton's Pond Visitor Center, and we'll start there. 
If you can't ride, you can still drop off a gift from 10-1....
All donated  toys are delivered to InterFaith Social Services in Quincy, and are distributed over  the holidays to families in need.

Meet at the Houghton's Pond Visitor Center( the one behind the playground with the nice roof...).

For info call DCR 617-698-1802.

SteveC

Turkey Club

Well we all hadda really cool ride Thursday.......four riding buddies from the good ol' 'Link' days and two outastaters who came all the way from Albany and York County PA, just to ride with us......really slippery leaves, roots, waterbars, rocks, MAJOR climbing (my glutes were sore for acoupla days!)....of course we had 'racer boy' Paul C. pushin us through our 12-mile slog........

We all made it back  in time to enjoy slothing about the house with our families and 'giving thanks' that we all made it back in one piece despite acoupla spectacular endoes......

In attendance were:

Sean F

Bill D

Paul C

Dana S

Joe from York

the Albanian

and Me

It was an amazing 52 F, usually T-Day is really cold and/or snowing.......

(Today is November 27th, and it's 62F ! Who says the globe ain't getting warmer? I'll leave that depressing rant for another day........anyways, gotta go ride!) 

Like a Virgin

New trail--that's something we don't hear much around here. It's usually enough to take care of what we've got anyways, and nothing excites the local managers less than the mention of cutting a new trail. This, despite the NEED to re-route many poorly-designed turn-of-the-century trails, is the unfortunate dilemma we are in here now in New England. Sure, there are some very upbeat land managers that embrace and instigate progress, even to the point of giving carte blanche to us mountainbike types, 'cause they know that we're the ones who will take care and nurture their established trails and thoughtfully design new ones. And there are even more LM's in between, who are just either on the fence about two-wheel use, some who are still realizing how much we can contribute to their park, some who are completely still in the dark ages, some who just don't have the time or resources to pay attention, even others who actually ride a mountainbike......... The list is endless, and I'm sure some psychologist could pare it down to three different types of land managers, but  we all know that the best kind om LM is one who we can work with.....
So, when we see the need for a new connector, go-round, switchback, or other cool new feature, and we ask, AND get the go-ahead, that's EXCEPTIONAL! When we're done doing the Papelbon dance, we get down and dirty with the LM and make a plan. The work has to make sense, and follow guidelines and directives set by the LM. Usually it helps to roundup a crew of hard-working volunteers. A nice sunday morning(church!) session in the spring or fall, with incentives like free lunch/coffee, etc, is a good way to getem out. Of course they(we) would all rather be out on the trail riding, but when there's work to do, ESPECIALLY cutting a new trail, that's a good enough incentive......

Anyways, we did get to cut a new connector on our last trail work day at Wompy.  Not a long one, but still, a NEW trail!

Soft, loamy, pineneedley, hardly defined save for some ribbon and some vague signs of human intervention.......

Now that the work is done, our job now is to ride it!

I'll never grow up

JRA the other day on some nice rolly, pine-needley trails that phantom wrist pain came back. No swelling, just a spot of pain near the base of my thumb-bone, that stops me from whatever I'm doing to say OW! I think it's basically good ol wear 'n tear on the old bones. Or, more likely, growing pains. I'll never grow up.
Anyways, I bought a new brace to at least wear at night. Last time I went to the doc, he said wearing it at night helps alot, as the problem could stem from sleeping on my wrist every night. So I'll try that, and stay off the mountain bike for a few days.....I tried riding last night and I cant grip properly without intense pain. I'll ride the road bike for now. And maybe I gotta rethink my position on the bike, again. Every few years I change it slightly, to alleviate some pain or another.....The Old Coot and CP have these 'Mary' bars that sweep back radically so that your hands are resting more naturally in front of you. More like the angle at which I hold my chef's knife, or a roto-tiller. It could be the shock needs another air adjustment.
Either way, it's break time for a few days or a week. I really don't want to miss fall riding, as it's really the best time of year to ride. Kids are back in school, and the weather is great. Not cold enough to take me off the bike yet, usually not til December. In fact right now it's been 80-90F all week.
Enough whining for now.

Summer's over(almost)

I think I've said it before, but summer is not really my season. Although I got a few really nice rides with friends, alot of kiddie rides, and managed the time to maintain my bike, summer is hard to keep the rhythm of a regular workout. That said, I don't feel like I've lost fitness. And I've spent more really good days with my kids, and that's more important than anything.
September's a few days away, and when school is back in session I'll resume my Wed am ride, and at least one other morning during the week.
The Landmine Classic and NembaFest are less than two weeks away, and we just had a great trail work day at Wompy to ensure that the trails were ready.....
It's still freakin' HOT! So it's not over, yet........

Today's Doubleheader

It's freakin'hot! So to the beat the heat, I started my Blue Hills ride at 7 am. Early by most standards, but a necessity for some of us......
Up Coon Hollow, down the access road. Up the ski-slope , down the access road 1/2 way, to just above the Wolcott to Border trail for a nice long cruising down.
Didnt do much of the South side , riding alone to me is boring.  A church needs a congregation....Although I did bump into my friends from Dave's Bike Infirmary who were bouncing down Coon Hollow.......
An hour and a half was more than enough of that.
So I figured since I have all morning to kill--wife & kids are gone for two days--what  better way to celebrate this newfound freedom than to continue riding. I found myself on the highway heading for Wompy, where I knew there was a group ride in session, and 'maybe' I'd find them. No sooner did I pull in that a new aquaintance of mine arrived to ride solo, a fairly new rider, so we teamed up and I showed him some of the finer Wompy trails on the left side.
Another hour and a half of swimming through the hot humid air--actually not bad compared to driving in the shite--we were cooked.
Don't really know wht tha point of this post was, and it's to freakin hot to sit here and type while I could be relaxing in the kiddie pool, so that's it!

Free-Riding at its purest..........

While on a week away from work with the wife and kids in Vermont, I made the point of looking up some of my good friends at a local valley town bike shop and get out on their weekly Thursday evening ride......
I've been visiting this group once a year, in July, for the last 3 years. Always a great bunch, they host an early Sunday morning 'church' ride as well as the Thursday ride. They are a great eclectic mix of people from the bike shop owner and his wife and dogs, artists, dairy farmers, musicians, Disney animation specialists, carpenters, mechanics, etc. The one thing they all have in common is the intimate network of trails that are either cutback or re-created every year (as one rider said, "ride them or lose them, as they will become overgrown in one season") combined with old jeep roads, logging trails, and shhhhh....some NF trails thrown into the mix that just cant be left to rot.
The other thing that most of these riders have in common are their over-40 pound riding machines......Stinkies, Dawgs, Bullits, with the occasional Rocky Mountain and much less occasional Sinister (overheard as "InyerSister") and Kona hardtails, all the bikes are hardcore, with longtravel forkage and the stickiest and tackiest and fattest of the fat tires available.
We got all 12 bikes in the back of a pickup quite nicely I must say, all upside-down, so all that was seen was this great mass of fat tires sticking out of the truck bed. And myself and a young rider behind the last one to hold them in place. We had driven uphill for about 3 miles already, and There I was with my lightweight custom steel hardtail rig, spinning uphill on a fairly steep jeep road for another two miles.......of course, I was the first one to the top, waiting for the burly rigs to make it up. All gathered for a breath and/or puff of the 'poetry weed' and to savor the valley views from the ridge........followed by the descent.
Now when you're at the top of a Vermont mountain range there really is only one way to get back home. Not wanting to follow the exact fall line for obvious reasons, these guys have cut some of the sickest, sweetest, steepest singletrack I've ever ridden. In fact some of it I couldn't ride. It was then that realized why they were all riding these 45lb moto-styled steeds. They were built for this.....these guys were flying! They assigned one of their slower guys to stick with me(as they always do with 'flatlanders')--it was fast getting dark, as the sun began to disappear behind the mountains.......
we got back just in time--my old peepers arent what they used to be at night, and I could hardly see the trail in front of me.....