Murray Lake Trail

This week Quinn's bike finally got a much-needed upgrade, so to give it a good test, we made the 30-mile trip down to Brighton State Recreation Area. There are a couple of nice bike trails there I've been anxious to ride. We did the Murray Lake Trail this time.

Quinn is riding a Scott Scale Jr 20 that we bought last year. It's a great little bike that isn't too heavy and actually has a plush front suspension fork that's well-tuned for a 50 pound rider. The most notable shortcoming to the stock Scott was the gearing. With 32/42 Lasco non-replaceable chainrings up front and 6 cogs in the rear ranging from 14 to 28 teeth, the bike was better-suited to street riding than off-roading, particularly if any hill-climbing was involved. I did some gear-inch calculations, and figured out that a 24/36 chainring set would put his gearing in the same general range as the lower end of a standard mountain bike. However, coming up with a crankset that has short, kid-sized 140mm crank arms and accepts the current standard mountain chainrings wasn't easy. We went with the simplest and most economical (relatively) solution. We ordered a TruVativ Isoflow crankset with shortened arms from Bikesmith Design and Fabrication. It has a 24-tooth ring on the inside, a 36-tooth ring in the middle, and a bashguard instead of a chainring in the outer position. It installed easily on the stock square taper bottom bracket, and seems to have about the right chain line. I installed the crankset Friday night, but waited to hit the trail until Sunday when Cindy was not working. Here it is:



Murray Lake Trail is nine miles long, and is the longer but easier of the two trails at Brighton. It was moderately easy, although it starts with a few steep ups and downs that were challenging and intimidating for the kids. In that early challenging section, we passed a couple of less-experienced adult bikers who might not have called trail easy at all. Much of the trail was fast, curvy, and swoopy; the sort of trail that is not super hard, but is really fun in a roller-coaster sort of way. Now that I have this GPS thing figured out, I can create maps of our adventures.



Quinn rode almost the entire trail in his lowest three gears; three gears he's never even had before. Although he said he couldn't tell any difference, he was able to climb hills I'm sure he could not have climbed before. He could not, however, climb all the hills. This was one of those sharp uphill switchbacks with a loose sandy surface.



Cindy got almost all the way through it. She was really enjoying her Superlight on this trail.



We stopped for a snack along South Ore Creek near the entrance to the Murray Lake Campground. The pleasant scenery was tempered by the biting flies and occasional speeding cars. We kept the kids fed and watered much better than I had last weekend, so everyone seemed to be in higher spirits. Nonetheless, by the time we were half way finished, the kids were asking how much longer we had to go.



Most of the trail was deep beneath the thick forest canopy. Occasionally it popped out into the sunshine and we were reminded that the temperature was in the 80's and the sun was shining brightly.



For this ride, I attached my camera case to the waist belt of my Camelbak. I was occasionally able to ride ahead of the rest of the scaq and stop to take pictures as they passed. Here the group easily descended a short curved section of downhill with some sand and a few protruding roots to make it interesting.





We ran across this guy in the middle of the trail. I guess he figured he didn't need a helmet.



This was a very fun trail, and it made for a really fun trip. I'm looking forward to getting back down to ride it again. I'm pretty sure the rest of scaq are too.

Poker Run

The kids and I participated in the MMBA Mid-Michigan Chapter Poker Run on Saturday. The event is the chapter's primary fundraiser each year. I don't think there could have been more than 30 attendees. I hope they raised at least a little money.

The Poker Run took place at Bennett Park, about 30 miles to our southwest. We dropped Mom off at work, left the dog at home, and drove down to Charlotte, MI.

I didn't plan very well for this one, but I wasn't sure what to expect. We'd had about an inch of rain on Friday and it was raining on us while I was loading the bikes. I was afraid the trails were going to be too muddy to ride, so I didn't think too much about packing us up for hours on trail. I should have.

We got to the park and pedaled some paved path and a little trail beside a rushing creek to get to the MMBA tent. There we registered for the ride, bought ourselves an MMBA membership, and picked up our bags of swag. Perhaps I should have know this, but there we learned that the Poker Run involved riding the Bennett Woods trails and stopping at five locations to pick up numbers that would eventually become our poker hand. The best hand got to pick first from the prizes that had been donated by various vendors of cycling goods.

What we should have done next is pick through the bags of swag for the Cliff bars and energy gels they contained, and packed those into our Camelbaks before we left. Then we should have pedaled back to the car, dropped off some of our extra clothing, and grabbed the camera. Also, I should have picked up a map and I should have brought my GPS receiver. Instead, at 10:30 in the morning we left the bags of what would soon be much-needed sustenance and pedaled off for 7.5 miles of muddy twisty single-track without a map and compass, GPS receiver, or a snack. At least we had plenty of water and bike repair supplies.

The trails of Bennett Park were fun and challenging, and not too muddy, although in places were had to cross small pools and flowing streams of dark muddy water that were not hub deep, but were deep enough that deraileurs, pedals, and feet were wet (in some places, with each of Quinn's pedal strokes his toes would dip into the water). I hate doing that to my bikes! As is typical for MMBA-built trails, miles of winding trail are packed into a small area like DNA in a chromosome, or the villi and microvilli in a small intestine. The trail was generally well-marked; in a few locations there were intersections and we were a little uncertain which trail to choose. A map or GPS would not have helped, but might have given a general picture of where we were relative to our starting point.

Some portions of the trail were lined by thick, wet vegetation, much taller than Quinn, and nearly as tall as me, even perched atop my towering RZ. In other areas the vegetation was less dense, but was often dominated by poison ivy. Some sections of trail were wavy: 10 feet up, 10 feet down, 10 feet up, 10 feet down, over and over. In the absence of roots, the kids navigated the waves; add slippery roots, and they did not. Most of the time, due the intestinal-lining nature of the trails and our collective limited experience with this sort of thing, our pace was slow. Even if I'd been alone, and going as hard as I could, the pace would generally have been slow. There were few places where one could really open up and fly.

By noon we were all quite hungry and I began hearing the familiar phrase, "How much longer? Are we almost there?" An hour later, the same questions. Abbey began to reach her limit before we reached the end of the trail. Her perseverance gave way to hunger and frustration humidity and sweat, bugs and spiderwebs, pain and itching. Quinn held up a little better than Abbey this time, which isn't necessarily typical, but perhaps he had started with a better surplus of calories.

We finished sometime around 1:45; reaching the MMBA tent hungry and muddy. We ate real hot dogs (made of what?) and I ate a hamburger made of real beef. There was only a small group hanging around the tent, and as usual I wasn't especially successful at introductions and socializing. Our Poker hands were quite good, Abbey and I each with two pair -- hers queens over tens, mine queens over sixes. Quinn, I think, had a pair of tens. I felt actually quite guilty coming away with the prizes we chose. Abbey picked a Louis Garneau women's set: a light jacket, shorts, gloves, and socks! I selected a Crumpler backpack, and Quinn... well, Quinn didn't find much that was oriented towards a 7-year-old boy, so he was a little disappointed, but ended up getting me a new set of Schwalbe tires. Other prizes we didn't snag included a couple set of nice Smith sunglasses, some other Crumpler goods, a White Industries hub set (nobody got those - they were only available for a royal flush), grips, shorts, t-shirts, a saddle, a chain, gift certificates for free Thompson components, and a bunch of t-shirts. It was fun but I felt guilty, like somehow we were outsiders coming in snagging prizes.

The day was quite an adventure. I'm sure the kids won't forget that one any time soon. Next time I'll bring snacks. Next time I hope we'll bring Cindy.

Additional details

If you read the previous post, you might come away thinking that it takes more than three hours of riding a bicycle in a forest to make a perfect weekend. You'd be right, of course, but the weekend had some other notable successes.

First of all, we had spectacular weather all weekend!

Friday evening I met with a former coworker of mine and he pointed me in the right direction on some sediment toxicology issues I've been struggling with on a project at work. Saturday morning, while Cindy was working, Abbey was off to a friends house, and Quinn was bumming about the house, I made some pretty good progress in implementing those methods and came up with some interesting answers on the project. Another four hours of free work for that client!

Saturday afternoon when Abbey got home, the kids and I put in three solid hours of lawn work (Quinn likes to run the weed whacker and Abbey made an attempt at mowing the back yard). We made some good progress on getting things cleaned up.

Cindy made a great dinner Saturday night that included her yummy potato salad. After that, I worked more on that work-related project while the rest of the family watched a movie.

Sunday afternoon we went to Wild Type and picked up a bunch of native Michigan plants for the yard. We got a variety of things as an experiment; we'll see what works and go from there. We spent several hours reworking gardens and planting our new plants that afternoon. Quinn was right there helping the whole time. Abbey has entered pre-teen years, so we don't know where she was.

OK. This week the kids are out of school Monday and Tuesday. Cindy has dresses to make and I have to survive another week of work.

A Better Sunday

It's hard for a glass-half-empty kind of guy like me to say we had a perfect weekend, but this was one was pretty good. I even considered titling this post, "A Perfect Sunday," but thought everyone would mistake it for sarcasm.

We got up this morning and went mountain biking right after breakfast. Need I say more?

On Thursday afternoon Cindy's suspension fork had come back from getting rebuilt at PUSH Industries. That's a long story I won't get into here, but I installed it as soon as I got home from work that day. I was not especially happy about having had to send it PUSH, but I was sure glad to have it back. Now that it's been PUSHed, I'm confident that it will be better than it was when new. It was the last piece of the build for Cindy's Santa Cruz Superlight. It was finally ready to ride. Do you think Amos would like to ride it?



This winter I didn't have the best luck with bike projects. I bought a used frame for Cindy and then a fork that was not new but hadn't been used, and started putting together the Superlight. Cindy being such aggressive, speed-demon sort of rider, I new she really needed a top-of-the line bike. Well, OK, I wanted her to have a nice, lightweight, dual-suspension bike that would be as comfortable and capable as she'd ever need. Of course I ran into some unexpected problems, but nothing a little more money wouldn't fix. In the middle of that project, investigating a creaking sound in my new (last fall) Cannondale Rize revealed a defective frame. Cannondale was nice enough to send me a replacement frame - a 2010 RZ140 4. Pretty much the same bike with a new name. I even got to move the parts from the old frame to the new frame myself. A few months later... here it is.



Getting back to this morning -- we tossed the four bikes atop the van and headed for Anderson Park. This is the same park Quinn and I went to last weekend. Except for some biking and hiking trails, Anderson Park is pretty much undeveloped. I like it that way, although a bathroom and a small parking lot would be an improvement I could live with. This weekend there were several other cyclists using the park, but the 'shroomers were gone.

We brought Amos with us to test his paws leash-free on the trail. Since Anderson Park is undeveloped and bordered on most sides by river, there is no traffic and almost nowhere for a loose dog to get lost. There are some park rules posted, but nowhere have I seen it explicitly stated that Amos can't run with us while we ride. It worked really well. He was well-behaved, stuck with us, and only once did he take a wrong turn.

We started off on the green loop. I led, with Amos literally at my heels. We just flew. He seemed to know exactly what to do, although it apparently didn't to occur to him to pace himself. For the first 30 minutes he just ran as fast as he could go. That green loop trail is just a really fun, smooth, twisty trail. The biggest challenge is maneuvering body and bars around and between the numerous large and small trees that line the trail. Many thanks to the MMBA volunteers for their hard work building these trails!



The red trail crosses a little ditch several times, requiring caution and reduced speed to keep from going over the bars. We only had one significant crash: Abbey, who has been getting pretty good at crossing logs and other obstacles, tried to cross a tree -- about 7-inches in diameter -- fallen across the trail that was several inches above the trail. She got her front end over it, but her back wheel didn't make it over until she went over the bars. She was bruised and scratched, but not bleeding badly enough for serious concern.



The other riders on the trail were generally interested in moving faster than we were, so occasionally we had to pull over to let them pass. A couple of times Amos just stood in the trail, not realizing that he was in the way (just like he was home in the kitchen).



This is a pretty segment of trail perched along a ridge by the river. Amos was getting tired and was quite happy to sit beside me when I stopped to take pictures and wait for everyone to regroup.



Abbey and I made one last loop on the green trail before we headed home. I wanted to push myself at faster pace, for a good workout. I thought I'd go alone, but Abbey and Amos hadn't had quite enough, so they came along for the ride.



Amos has never covered so much ground at such speed in one day. We had ridden 5.5 miles, but with all the back-and-forth between me and the kids, Amos must have run more than 6. He was one tired puppy. Nonetheless, his decision to roll in a giant pile of poo right before we finished that final loop was certainly not appreciated. We did our best to clean him off with our remaining water and some newspaper before we could let him in the van. Thanks a lot, Amos.

Skateboard

Quinn had gone too long without a skateboard to call his own. After all, he is 7. Last year after Christmas and his birthday, he wanted to pool his gift moneys to buy one, but we convinced him to wait since it might be little more than frustrating to buy a skateboard in the middle of winter. A snowboard might have made sense.

The snow melted and we began hearing about the skateboard again. Quinn and I made a deal that if he could make through the entire month of April without tearing his newest pair of jeans, we'd start looking at skateboards in May. I think he only wore those pants twice. May arrived, and last weekend we finally made it to the local skateboard shop. We got him a board, and dude, it is like, totally awesome.

Here it is:

Happy Mother's Day!

Rainy Sunday

It stormed Saturday night and Sunday morning, but in the afternoon the roads dried so we pulled out the tandems. Most of the time we were out, the sky continued to threaten rain, but for the most part we stayed dry.



Notice that something is missing from the big blue Burley? Quinn's legs are now long enough that he no longer needs the child stoker kit. With his saddle pushed all the way down, he can now reach the pedals with a simple set of bolt-on crank shorteners. This is really nice because his center of gravity is lower now, and we don't have the added weight and drag of a third bottom bracket, third crankset, and third chain. The difference in the center of gravity is only slightly noticeable when we're riding. The difference in weight is noticeable only when I lift the bike over my head to mount it in the rack on the van.



We were racing up a hill on Willoughby Road and the girls somehow dropped their chain when shifting down to their littlest chainring. This had happened once before a couple of years ago. The chain ends up stuck between the bottom bracket and the little ring, and it requires quite a big of greasy maneuvering to work it free. Extra messy since I'd just oiled the train. This is what a stranded all-girl tandem team looks like.



Last fall, a two-year road work project on the south end of the MSU campus was finally completed. Now we have good bicycling access to campus again. What this means for our weekend bicycling is that we can now include the MSU Dairy Store as a stop on our standard route.



We had coupons for free waffle cones with two scoops of ice cream. Two was too much, so we settled for a scoop a piece for the kids, and Cindy and I shared a scoop. Ours was mint chocoloate chip. Yum. Abbey had chocolate chocolate chunk.



Quinn had Death by Chocolate. All over his face.

Rainy Saturday

I don't really think it's likely that the rain falls disproportionately on the weekends, but sometimes I wonder. Either way, last weekend was a good one, as rainy weekends go. Maybe that's because for a rainy weekend it wasn't really all that rainy.

I'll warn you up front that this is going to be a rather boring read. There aren't even any pictures.

As usual, Cindy was working on Saturday, so the kids and I made plans to do some trail riding. I must diverge here and comment about my terminology. When I use the term "trail riding" my intention is to describe the riding of bicycles with fat, knobby tires on something other than pavement. I probably should simply let it go and call it "mountain biking," but I have a little trouble with that term in the absence of mountains (probably because I really wish we lived in the mountains). There are some great trails in Michigan, mostly thanks to the Michigan Mountain Biking Association , and I absolutely don't mean to suggest that riding them isn't tremendously challenging, fast and furious fun, and a great workout. I simply mean that the trails we usually ride in the Lansing area are trails through the forest, not trails through the mountains. "Whatever!" you might say, and that's fine, too. One of my goals for this summer is check out some of the trails in the more heavily contoured portions of southern Michigan. Maybe, if everything works out just right, I'll get a chance to ride some of the trails in the Upper Peninsula this summer, too.

While we were getting our gear together on Saturday, one of Abbey's friends called and requested her company for the afternoon, so trail riding with kids became trail riding with Quinn. That was great, because Abbey is pretty cautious, and in her absence Quinn and I could simply throw that stuff to the wind.

We sent Abbey away, ate a quick lunch, and loaded up the bikes for the 17-mile drive (so much for car free recreation) to Anderson Park, which is a mostly undeveloped piece of forest along the Grand River in south Lansing. Some of the park is off-limits to bicycles, but MMBA has put a really nice effort into making some fun bicycle trails in other portions of the park.

The primary users of Anderson Park appear be mushroom hunters. When we arrived a little after noon on Saturday, there were no other cyclists at the park, but there were five car-loads of 'shroomers wandering around looking under leaves for their prey. The forest appears to be a dense second growth forest, shady and moist, with ferns and forbes covering the floor. Great for mushrooms, great for bike trails. Maybe the absence of bicyclists resulted because for days the weather forecast had predicted a 90% chance of heavy rain on Saturday. There had been a trace overnight, but the trails were only slightly damp and were nicely tacky, providing excellent traction.

I warned you that this would be boring...

Quinn and I first rode the green loop, which we'd ridden last year with girls. It is really fun. The trail is generally smooth and flowing, but too tight and twisty to build up much speed. The gentle ups and downs and constant curves make it a very enjoyable. In many places the trail squeezes between trees, which is a challenge on a bike like my Rize (now RZ) with such wide bars. There are only a few log crossings, and just a few little rocky spots, but for the most part the trail could just as easily be ridden on a cyclocross bike as a mountain bike. Riding with Quinn, I avoided pushing the limits: there were no crashes. We both had a good time.

After finishing the green loop, we buzzed down the road to the red loop. The red loop is a little more challenging that the green, but only a little. There are some slightly bigger hills and a couple of spots where you can really build up some speed and then power through some bermed corners. There's a two- or three-foot deep ditch that runs through this portion of the park, and the red trail crosses it repeatedly. Quinn was a little afraid of it the first time he went through it, so I stood close by to assist, just in case. It was actually quite easy, and after that he enjoyed dropping in and popping out each time.

Quinn seemed a little tired after the red loop, and was ready to call it quits, so I made him do the green loop again. I probably shouldn't have - he was too tired and started complaining about his legs hurting before we finished the loop. We settled for riding the portion of the green loop that's south of the road, and then packed up the bikes and headed home. We'd had about 5.5 miles of fun in just a couple of hours.