A perfect fall day for an imperfect fall ride.

It was beautiful on Friday. I had the day off. I rode my bike.

Temps were inching into the 50's and the sun was out so I just couldn't resist grabbing my mountain bike and hitting the trails. I was in the mood for a longer ride on some of the upper foothills trails that I don't ride too often. I decided to ride up Orchard Gulch, down 5 Mile Gulch, and down 3 Bears.

About 15 minutes into the ride my chainring bolts decided that they wanted to work their way completely through my plastic bashring. I don't know why Shimano made a plastic bashring. I don't know why I have it. Anyways, I spent about 15 minutes on the trailside trying to get them to work again, but to no avail. I finally decided to pull the bashring off entirely. This rendered my middle 32t chainring totally inoperable, and I had to drop my chain down onto my "emergency" little 22t chainring. I knew that the downhills and flats would totally suck but it was worth it because I wanted to keep riding.

2 minutes later I had the brilliant idea of cross-chaining to gain some extra gears and I snapped my chain. Another 5 minutes on the trailside.

The next hour went well. I spun easily up Rocky Canyon road to the Orchard Gulch trailhead, ate a poptart, and continued on.




It was gorgeous out, and the scenery was amazing. I love being that far up in the foothills. It starts to feel like you are riding in the mountains, rather than the plain-jane foothills. After fifteen minutes of climbing up the gulch, my bike became difficult to pedal and then just stopped cold. After a few minutes of "what the crap!?!?!" I found the problem My cassette lockring had come unscrewed and my cassette had done some weird "I'll jump off the freehub and stop moving" thing. I spent 10 minutes wrestling with my rear wheel to get this fixed.




I climbed up the rest of Orchard Gulch and descended 5 Mile Gultch. No pictures of it though because that downhill is one of the funnest EVER! So much flow. You can go all out in most places. Oh, and the fall scenery was twice as pretty.


On the way up to 3 Bears, the cassette thingy happened again. I got the fix down to 3 minutes.

3 Bears pounded me to death, but it was still a hoot. Pedaling home from the military reserve sucked and was agonizingly slow in my small chainring.

18.8 miles. 2 Hours riding time. 3.5 hours total... I haven't touched that bike since. Oh well. A ride is still a ride, and a ride in this beautiful fall weather on sweetness trails is a great ride.