Gorgeous pic's by all!


Crispy air is here. Sat. was play time with the C-X crowd riding modern. Temp upper 30's in the AM.
Today was just soaking in the paths. (Did have a few hazards from flocks of Canadian geese controlling path traffic to gifts dropped from the tree's but the real scare was outriding some big bad dog! haha)

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Nice pictures everyone. The CCRT ride looked like a great time.

I have two separate rides worth of photos. First I went down to the Kettle Moraine area to visit my father over the weekend. It was 40 degree weather with an increasing rain, and a gusty wind. So I cut my planned 60 mile ride down to 36 miles. Some photos of that ride in this post.

piazza?:)

Then today I rode 56 miles on the Elroy Sparta trail. Though it's a rail trail, there was 3300 feet of steady climbing. The trail was in great condition today after a bit of rain yesterday. Just starting to see fall color there. You'd think after my third tunnel trail of the year that I'd remember to take my sunglasses off before going into the dark...

Fall is getting ready to fall in my neighborhood too. I took a half day off in the middle of a truly rotten week (don't ask) and rode to a place called Obstruction Point, on a dirt road that shoots off from Hurricane Ridge, which is well known to readers of this thread and a "bucket list" ride for many who will never get the chance to try Mont Ventoux.

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I drove up to Hurricane Ridge, then down/up/down/up the first few miles on the Obstruction Point road to avoid most of the get-off-and-walk parts of the trip. Where I parked the car I was at 6,000 ft and gained another couple hundred on the next six miles and lost it again on the way back. The first thing you notice at 6,000 feet (if most of your riding is near sea level, like mine) is the first little hill gets you breathing pretty hard and you don't really stop until you stop and rest for a couple of minutes. Ain't much air up there! The road looks nice and smooth in the pics, but even with fairly fat tires was bumpy enough to keep the descent speeds down to 20mph or so; my hands were getting fairly hammered by the little washboards I kept running into. As a result, the gravel was only moderately grinded yesterday :(



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Fall color happens at high altitudes too, but with more modestly sized flora. Up here, a fir tree commonly takes a century to grow to a height of 25 feet or so. Whatever these scrubby little ground cover plants are, they sure get red. This is my first time up here this late in the season; I've never seen anything but green and brown here before, having never visited after late August.
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Definitely an otherworldly place. I'm a little disappointed it wasn't brighter yesterday; it would have made this vegetation really 'pop' if we had really good light.
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A mountain ash tree at the end of an unofficial trail (don't tell the rangers I went down there). It was so bright I though it was somebody's day-glo orange tent when I saw it at a distance.
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Road back to the car:
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Beautifull autumn colors there :thumb:

I gotta check that out sometime, caveman! Great ride and photos

Did a few dusty miles on my new cross bike -- Mission Trails Regional Park.

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Nice pics.

What brand is it?

Red River ride - Grand Forks, North Dakota
 

Spent some time with family in North Dakota / Minnesota. Lucky for me, my Dad had an old Schwinn world tourist to enjoy (a little small, but it did the trick). Got in 20 miles of Red river riding.

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Thanks. It's a Cannondale CAAD 9 CX

Thought so.

Great build. Practical for your new locale I'd wager.

Wish you could have stopped in St. Paul.

I'm finally riding again after a three week health related break.

Good to hear you are back on the bike.

Yep.

Two rides today. Mud/sand/ruts/jumps down at the river. Then a nice ride this afternoon with Mrs. Gomango.

Just about perfect weather here today.

Well, bikeforums just ate my long-winded description of this lovely 53 mile, hilly gravel ride I did in the Berkshires of western MA. So rather than recreate my lost narrative, here are some shots from one of the loveliest days of riding I've experienced. It was a cool, crisp autumn day, the fall foliage in full vibrancy. Out of 53 miles, probably over 75% was on gravel country roads or jeep track forest access roads. It took a whole day for me to come off the high from this ride.

On to the pictures:

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My riding buddies, one of whom is a neighbor and friend, and the other I met just that day, both had 650B bikes. From left to right: Rivendell Saluki, my Rawland Stag, Soma Grand Randonneur.

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Plenty of muddy jeep track was to be had on this ride:

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The last of three major climbs, and the gnarliest of them all that day-- a climb on an unmaintained access road which was 14% grade over two miles. It had been paved at one point, but had washouts with rocks the size of baseballs. I was not ashamed to have to walk my bike through the worst of it!

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southpawboston, nice pics! That looks like a great adventure.

FWIW, it rained pretty much all day here in the eastern half of the state.

Sorry for the self-indulgence, but here are a few more:

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And one of the coolest bad-ass bikes on the ride, Pamela Blalock and John Bayley's titanium 650B Seven tandem:

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Wow, great shots southpaw. I really wish we had more roads like that around here. Well, we have plenty, I'd just have to ride 60+ miles to get to them. How do you like your Stag? I almost ordered one, but decided to go semi-custom instead (still waiting on the frame, too).

Just fantastic.

Now that's living.

Thanks! Well, this was western MA, and I live in eastern MA. So it was a 2.5 hr drive early in the morning before this ride, and then home again afterward. Not exactly in my backyard!The Stag is wonderful. A very capable production 650B bike, either as a long-distance randonneur or as a fat-tire off-road road bike. Very lightweight, with clearances for 50mm tires. The only drawback is the fork which is overbuilt compared to the rest of the frame, a problem with just about all Taiwanese production bikes. The result of a stout fork is a less compliant ride, especially on rough roads, or off-road. A bunch of us on the Rawland list have gone in on a batch purchase of custom Jeff Lyon replacement forks which will be built to the same geometry as the stock fork, but will be made of much lighter, more compliant TOEI special oval blades, and will utilize the Grand Bois crown. That fork should transform the Stag into a near perfect, almost off-the-shelf 650B.Which maker did you go with??!!

I should have mentioned, in this shot, early into the ride, my friend on the Soma Grand Randonneur crashed. He's a pretty insane cyclist on descents, and he was screaming down the descent in this photo and ended up understeering through the turn. He went into the ditch and endo-ed, but was incredibly lucky he landed in soft ferns, narrowly avoiding that tree on the right! He and the bike were fine, and he finished the ride without further incident.

Nice! I've read that very thing from others about the Stag, although for the price, it's still such a fantastic value. I decided to go with Joshua Bryant. His CF Randonneuse project really appealed to me for a variety of reasons. I should get the frame before long. Jeff Lyon does incredible work, and initially I planned to go through him; I even sent him a deposit, but after waiting several months and hearing nothing from him, I got impatient. Besides, the JBryant included everything I wanted as-is, including custom racks (and lowrider racks), so I just decided to go for it. Part of me regrets not getting the Stag and saving quite a bit of money, but oh well. Any of these options should work just fine for me, in the end. I also looked at the Soma GR, but I didn't care for the paint scheme and the bend of the fork legs just looked odd to me. Those are fairly minor issues, but a more major one was that none of the available frame sizes weren't quite right for me. It looks like a great deal, though, for those who can work with the sizing.

@southpawboston:was that the F2G2 ride?

Yes!

I've been following Joshua Bryant's work and am very impressed. I'm sure his CF project bike will be fantastic! I've been following his FaTRoB project with interest, and part of me wanting to replace the fork on the Stag is in response to that bike! Unfortunately the new fork will have a slightly narrower crown, so the max tire width it'll ever take is about 45mm. I'm currently riding Compass Babyshoe Passes in 42mm which work supremely well on most surfaces except where it's slippery, such as mud or really loose gravel/rocks. I'm hoping the upcoming Bruce Gordon Rocky Road in 650B will measure no more than 45mm, as that promises to be the perfect tire to mate to the Stag. As a side note, I also recently got a Jeff Lyon full custom, which I haven't built up yet!