After doing a 7 mile climb on Saturday's ride we took a break at the top and then prepared to descend back down. One the way down my bike starting to make an awful racket -even without without pedaling. My brother was trailing me and the noise was so loud he could even hear it. It sounded like it was coming from either around the crank or the front wheel. I was worried the bike was going to come apart and this was a really bad place for that to happen. You can easily hit 40 mph and there are a number of good hairpins to negotiate. After about a mile I stopped to check it out.

We could not find anything and I could not duplicate the noise without the bike moving. I'd never had this happen in 10+ years of riding. My brother once had the exact frame I was riding and his had cracked........so that was running through my mind.

We finished the descent but the noise was still there. We stopped at the bottom of the hill at a store to more thoroughly check the bike out. We took the wheels off, looked for cracked rims or bad/loose bearings, checked the frame, tightened the skewers more snugly, re-tightened the stem, etc. Finally when I juggled the rear water bottle it made a similar noise. I moved the bottle around a little and the noise went away. Go figure.

I was still suspect when I got home. After all, this is the bike I'm packing up today to send to Colorado for a week's riding. I have to ship it tomorrow and have to pack it today. I surely didn't want to send a defective bike out there and either miss riding or even worse be on a descent doing 50 mph and the bike come apart on me. My brother suggested I consider taking my other bike so was debating that. However I like this bike for these rides since it's older, it has the slightly easier gearing and I'm not as concerned about it getting stolen or riding on unpaved roads. I thoroughly cleaned it up and checked it out very carefully again. I took the bottle cage off looking for cracks in the tubes and the bottle cage and everything looked solid.

Maybe that road where we heard the noise is just plain haunted...........However if that noise starts up again in Colorado I'm going to be one aggravated rider.