General Cycling Discussion - Cricket invasion in Utah, Nevada & Idaho!

Say it ain't so! :eek:

The guy on the radio said today that the crickets are so thick that that the squished crickets on the roads are slicker than black ice! What kind of tires do ya use for that? Talk about bugs in the teeth! Leave the Gu at home, but you'll need lots of water to swallow 'em with, tho.

That's gotta s#ck.

They are refering to the mormon crickets which have been bad the last couple years. They are moreso in the desert region. I have yet to see any of them but I understand they are getting quite thick through Nevada. The truck drivers i deal with on a daily basis say the dirt roads out near the gold mines look like they are paved because of the crickets. You dont need to really worry about them in the rec areas. They usually keep them sprayed well.

Roadbuzz..... When I saw the title of this thread, I thought. "Really".

Americans have at last cotoned on to OUR beloved English Game.

Ball on Willow, Snowy White Kit, Cucumber Sandwiches, during the break. LOL....

Willic

The South African variant has a braiivleis during the
break, the cucumber sani's are just too gauche.

you know, after 5 years of watchin Cricket, I kind of
miss it, and don't be looking for it in Texas!

Marty

The Mormon Crickets are certainly bad this year in SW Idaho. These are pretty large bugs (2-3 inches long as adults), technically katydids and not crickets. As the days get warmer, they are gradually migrating en masse to the higher elevations. They are particularly bad on the roads, since they are cannibalistic and eat dead crickets. It's a gross cycle where the live ones out in the road eating dead crickets in turn get squished by cars. I hear the trails are bad too, but not as bad as the roads. Rotting cricket corpses in the sun make for quite the unpleasant odor. :eek:

I climbed Bogus Basin road (local ski hill out of Boise) last night. The crickets aren't too bad from 3000 to 4000 ft, where you can usually swerve to miss the live ones. At around 5000 ft they are literally blanketing the road, both alive and dead. I turned around early at this point as the sensation of guts-soaked crickets bouncing off my shins was just too much for me (they start hopping around when they see a bike approaching). Also, the smell was getting really bad. Yuck. Have to watch it on the decents also, so you don't wash out on bug guts in the corners. :o

I can't wait till we get a nice rainstorm coming through to clean off the roads. At least the scourge should be over in a few weeks.

Edited to add a photo of what some roads look like around here, paved and unpaved. Bogus Basin road, paved, has some sections even worse than in this photo. :eek:

http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu/269ps.jpg

Ron in Boise :beer:

Right now they are a good 100 miles away from me, next year, they will be 20 miles away. These things are nasty, up to 250,000 of the insects per acre over as many as 6 million acres...

When I lived in Abilene, Texas years ago, crickets often covered the sidewalks during their season. I'd see dead and expiring crickets banked against buildings in what looked like small black drifts.

Still, I've always been fond of them. That whole 'cricket on the hearth' good luck thingy.

Well...fond of them until I'd get one indoors and have to hunt it down in the middle of the night while it chirped it's little compound eyes out keeping me awake. But even then I'd just liberate it via the back door. I'm loath to kill one of Nature's beings.

Except yellowjackets. Treacherous little stinging bullets. :mad:

-Rob

Hey, you can't show crickets in compromising positions here, this is a family forum!!! Are you out of your mind? moderator, get him out of here; take your smut someplace else, I think the Bicycling Magazine Forum may appreciate that kind of smut but we don't tolerate it around here.

Originally posted by lotek
Willic

The South African variant has a braiivleis during the
break, the cucumber sani's are just too gauche.

you know, after 5 years of watchin Cricket, I kind of
miss it, and don't be looking for it in Texas!

Marty

lotek, maybe you remember from Joburg the really ugly, awful smelling, mole cricket named after one of the suburbs and known as the Parktown Prawn? I register all my software as Parktown Prawn Exports Ltd, and I once received an email from someone in Canada who looking at the viability of importing Parktown Prawns. I should have sent him a box of the critters as a freebie!

No cricket in Texas! Wow, life must be really boring?:D

I can't say that I take much interest in the game being a rugby fan myself. This weekend, the Springboks bt Scotland, Ozzie bt Wales, Ireland A bt Tonga, and the worst possible result, the arrogant English team bt the All Blacks in NZ for the first time in 30 yrs.:eek:

hmm haven't seen those crickets here yet... so nevada is still free of the little buggers :)

(I think it's a bit too hot for them here also :rolleyes: )

Be careful Joe! We need you alive and well here... ;)

When I first read the thread title, I thought our all-conquering Australian cricket team had landed in the US to teach you guys a thing or two about the game played by flannelled fools.

R

In east Texas in early May, it was June bugs that were really horrible!