Sedona '09

We visited Arizona for school vacation week. The Grand Canyon was our first stop, for just an afternoon. We went to the busiest part of the rim, expecting it to be off-season. It was beautiful, but I was amazed how many people were there. The rim felt like a theme park, not wilderness. We did a small part of a trail toward the river 3/4 mile below us, but even that was quite crowded. (The trail visible in this picture is about halfway down - we didn't get nearly that far.) Another time we'd try the North rim or some other, less crowded place.

Next back to Sedona, where we've visited the last few years. We did the usual fun things, but came away wanting to do new things next time around. E found a new trail for us, along side of a "lion's head", ending in the shady spot in the pic below. Other new experiences include a delightful stargazing stop and a large snake crossing the trail right in front of me.


Since the three of us have some different interests and exercise preferences, we did a little more as a pair and one, with different mixes and activities. I got a 3 hour hike mostly in the high desert, with a bonus rumor of a rattlesnake blocking the trail while A and E rode horses. (I didn't see that snake, so it doesn't count.) Another time E and I mountain biked without A, exploring new trails.

Sedona itself has changed over the years too. We didn't see as much new housing this year as last, but the motorized tourist industry sure has grown. Where there were Pink Jeeps the first year, they're now joined by red and yellow ones, and there were so many that they sometimes dominated the roads. I've grown a real dislike for these things after we tried one years ago - I felt like I was taking part in actual destruction of a beautiful and fragile (once) wild area.

I half-expected to find a new statue of Joe the Plumber, but never saw it. On the other hand, one of the first ads I saw was for Maverick helicopter tours.

Winter Bike Pics

Now that winter is ending, let's look back at the crazy stuff I used to ride it. Above is SlushBike, the thing I built up specifically for bad weather riding, and it's optimized for the worst case which is slush. Besides the 26" studded road tires and big fenders to match, it takes on bad weather with its Nexus8 internally geared rear hub where most of the gearing is sealed from road dirt. It also has an internal brake which is also sealed. The nexus is intended for a frame with horizontal dropouts, which I don't have, so needed to retain the rear derailleur just as a chain tensioner. I took advantage of that, though, by keeping two chainrings to widen the gear range. This sacrifices light weight, but I like the range, and this bike is so heavy that the derailleurs don't matter much.

One of my major limits for cold weather riding is cold toes. At this point I have 2 different hacks going. Above are the Lake MXZ302-X boots which I bought only after they came out in a wide size in 2008. (Even these are narrower than my feet, so I bought a size or 2 larger than would be ideal.) I use these on SlushBike and the MTB, and they're pretty good. But after the first season some heel stitching fell off, which I attribute to a design defect, so even after Lake re-stitched them for me, I added tougher stitching which you can see in the shape of an "M" above. The insoles are made of bubblewrap, too, which might be warm but which pops and falls apart. These are surprising problems coming from what looks like a mature shoe company.

Below are Keen boots I modified before I heard the Lakes were going to be available in a wide model. Here I made plates of 1/4" aluminum, cut away the soles under the plates so they'd be close to flush, and assembled it. The plates are for mounting the pedal cleat, as well as stiffening the boot for pedalling efficiency. I use this on my 'summer' bike, which uses Bebop pedals, allowing me to ride it down to around freezing. (This bike cannot use studded tires, so I wouldn't want to ride it much below freezing anyway.) I sewed the gaiters for wind protection and visibility. (I took pictures of this project, but can't find them now.)

PR Meditation

Saturday morning I rode the PR (the "Private Reserve", a local spot with good MTB/hike trails). This is a strange time of year, when warm temperatures release mud and riding becomes bad for the trails. Now that I have studded tires on my bike, I much prefer mountain biking below freezing, when the surfaces are harder and I can't contribute to erosion. The weekend forecast was Springlike, so literally too warm to ride. The best chance for a ride was Sat. morning, ending around 9 when the forecast rose to melting.

The trails were about half frozen, so I was glad to have the studs as the terrain meandered among snow, dirt, ice and rock. But the studs are less grippy on the ice than I had expected, and they're worse than summer tires on rock. The melting snow exposed scarier parts of the trails, hidden for months now, and its smooth contours yielded to the rougher trail textures. Put together, the trails felt harder than I expected. This was worst on the bridges, homemade stream crossings in various states of disrepair across the PR.

I felt thoroughly limited by my mental state. This feels ironic in what looks like a physical sport, but that got me thinking about yoga. According to my book, yoga has been practiced for millenia and is seen as a form of meditation, though it too looks (and usually feels to me) purely physical. (I am a rank beginner at yoga and barely past that stage in MTB.) I would like to chat with a yoga expert and an MTB expert on whether MTB can be a meditation in the way yoga can be. I suspect there's at least a bit of overlap.

XC Ski Tophet Chasm

We've had the best snow in years over the last two weeks, so I've been XC skiing instead of biking. (At the same time, the snow piles at intersection corners are so high that I've heard car drivers voice fears about the poor visibility with other cars.) For the first week I warmed up on the trails I help maintain behind my work building. After that, inspired by MF's description of snowshoeing there, I took my skis to Tophet Chasm. This is a place I've mountain biked plenty of times, but it hadn't occurred to me that it could be skied.

When I bike at Tophet I usually drill Oak Hill, which for me is a textbook on climbing and descent. When I go with friends we generally take in the Chasm trail too, but I'm still nervous on it. There are only one or two places where this trail is beyond my strength/skill, and that would be ok. My problem is controlling fear as the side drop on the right side of the trail steepens as we climb, becoming downright cliff-like.

The first time I went to the chasm, I brought snowshoes and fully expected to need them for the approach to the chasm. Half of it is a fire road, but so steep that I can have trouble biking it. I found I never needed the snowshoes, and was further surprised that other ski tracks were already on the trail. I skied up and down the trail a couple times, and tried a little off-trail. The whole area was spectacularly beautiful, and the skiing was wonderfully fun. It's a tribute to the quality of the snow that as of Thursday there were only about three bits of exposed rock on this trail under pines.

I took these pictures going both ways on the trail. I found the lens of our digicam isn't wide enough to capture a real flavor of the trail alongside the chasm edge. The picture above shows the steepest place on the Chasm trail, where someone approaching the camera skis down a steep rock face. It's so steep I've never biked it, but these pictures look more flat than the real place. My climb requires stair-stepping through the trees to the left of the trail, around that rock, and as far as I can tell I'm the only one doing that, so I believe the other skiers are descending only. (That surprises me because descending is much riskier than the climb.)

Forecast shows another good week, staying below melting and some snow Wed, so I'll be out there some more. One of the great things about Tophet is it's nearly on the way to work when I drive, so stopping there on the way to the office costs little time and energy. I hope the XC ski season keeps on running!

Snow MTB

A week ago I decided to try mountain biking on snow, specifically the ice-glazed snow of the PR. I've ridden a couple times on trails with enough traffic and melting that the ice was intermittent, but here was a new category. We had plentiful snow, followed by rain and warm days, followed by cold, leaving the trails with a smoothly undulating ice over enough snow to cover even the tips of the rocks. I don't have studded tires for my mountain bike, and the rubber slid easily on the ice. I crashed twice in the first 50m, but my pads and the impossibility of going fast made crashes nonthreatening. The crashes did not bode well - I hadn't even reached a slope yet. I was surprised that the trails seemed utterly unused - providing none of the icy texture I've had before. And the ice weakened off the center of the trail so that if my tire drifted (slid) there, it would often break through the crust and become stuck. I started thinking about heading home and switching to a road ride instead.
After that 50m there's a substantial descent, steep enough that E still has trouble climbing it sometimes. Before I got there I had decided to walk it, but even that was tricky with the smooth ice and the bike sliding around. I had to kick into the crust to make tiny steps. Boding worse.
By default I took the path E and I normally use, heading toward the jumps. But I found myself walking as much as riding, and even the riding parts felt out of control. At the first bridge, a short straight non-rickety one, someone had kicked off most of the ice, but the approach and far side were so slick that I could easily imagine failing to line up the three segments. I did ride it, but was sliding again on the far side. Soon after that, again walking a trivial climb, I gave up: I just don't have the right equipment for this and I'm going home. And I'd made a mistake - I had thought about using SlushBike's front wheel with its studded tire on the mountain bike, but I didn't remember to set this up before coming. So I began planning my next attempt as I backtracked.
A turn before the base of that substantial hill I was on a flat trail and was riding for a change. At the turn to go up the hill I had a flash that at this moment I was having fun, so maybe I should continue on this flat trail another 50m or so, then turn around and go home. The path began a slight incline, but it wasn't terrible, so I rode it and kept going. Then I shifted to riding until I got stopped, then I'd turn around. But I was on a perimeter, easy trail here, and by the time I did get stopped I'd forgotten about turning around. I wound up walking the bridges, but riding most of everything else.
When I reached the "cliff" above Route3, I decided to take a snack break. (This is the eastern edge of the PR, and I'd started on the western edge then heading north.) While watching the cars go by I thought more about how I was breaking through the ice and decided to let some air out of the tires. Before this I had discovered that unlocking the suspension helped, and later I found that standing off the saddle helped - my technique evolved to trying to float over the crust, and this also maximized my steering grip. And I hadn't realized it while riding, but I'd been riding some much tougher hills than I could at the start of this ride. I was improving!
I continued south then west. There's a flat singletrack with rather dense forest on either side heading east, and those trees lifted my spirits and I found myself going fast. Why not see how fast I could go? After riding in the lowest gear almost all day, I shifted past 2 into 3 and I think 4, and it all held together. Here's where I really felt the difference in standing out of the saddle, and the softened fork actually started doing the work of absorbing bumps. (In this case, this cushioning was spent making my passage gentle enough to avoid cracking the ice or bumping my balance, forcing a tiny lateral or other force which could make the bike start sliding.) In this mode I completed that part of the path and connected with a fire road (a boring trail). Before I reached the fire road, though, it occurred to me that I had missed visiting one of E's favorite areas, which we call "mosquito land". (This is roughly due west of the biggest log ride in the PR, out to around the middle of the PR west-east.) So, after reaching the fire road and turning around, I headed there.
Mosquito land is a swampy area featuring some of the worst bridges in the PR. I'd forgotten about a short steep descent to enter it, and I couldn't even clearly see the trail so once more I was walking. Then a short ride but with enough turns and undulations that I lost that feeling of confidence I'd put together above. Then I faced a bridge, this one rather long, primarily a ladder shape made of inadequate lumber, with the near half submerged in the swampy water. To patch that situation, there was a 2x8 informally bridging the near shore with the middle of the bridge. To frost the cake, a fallen tree lay nearly along the right edge of the bridge. Unlike the frozen pond areas I'd ridden over, this area was wet and black. I stood studying the obstacle, decided to ride it and tried to clear my mind of distractions. Fully focussed, I mounted the bike, rode the icy land to the bridge, and started along the plank. I soon dropped onto the slightly-submerged ladder part, but that was ok. What I didn't count on was the ladder part then shifting and canting under my weight. I naturally steered to adjust, but by then I was on the dry side where the tree lay along the edge, and when my front wheel touched it I lost steering control and then balance and tipped out over the tree. This was all low-speed and I had my foot out to land on, but I couldn't quite reach the grassy bump I aimed for, and instead I sank to the middle of my shin in the water.
On the far side I took off all the wet stuff and wrung it out or smacked it as best I could, making a big mess of brown on the clean white crust. Then I thought of Shifu from E's current favorite movie at the moment, and what he said to his student, the Kung Fu Panda: 'when you concentrate, you suck.'
My wool socks were impressively warm, and in fact I never got cold at all. But I did head back home after that, boot squishing the whole way. I tried to get to the car quickly, largely because a month or two ago, when E fell into the ice at Mine Falls, getting cold was a big worry so we sprinted the mile to the car as fast as possible. Riding fast would have been a good idea anyway, to really nail down the technique I'd been building. In fact, I only half realized what I'd done when I rode the bottom half of the substantial hill near the car.
In the end, it was a great ride and I've ordered a rear studded tire for next time. I'll ride the road front wheel from SlushBike.
(If you're interested in the tires, I ordered one Nokian "Freddies Revenz Lite" tire, which is 2.3" wide with 336 studs. I picked this because it's their widest studded tire, and I really want width to help me float over the glazing. SlushBike runs Nokian "Hakkapeliitta W106", a 1.9" wide road tire with only 106 studs. Peter White has a good but stale article about these. They're made by Finns with a fun sense of humor I don't quite understand. I believe "Freddies Revenz" is a reference to Freddy Krueger. And my Hakkapeliittas came with tags on them featuring the smiling, disembodied head of a Ward Cleaver type with a thought bubble reading, "Hi, I'm your dad!".)

Crank Upgrade

Ok, this wasn't strictly necessary, but my friend MF found a great deal on nice modern (silver) cranks, my quick research showed they'd save significant weight over what I had, and my old blue ones were frankly on the ugly side. Here's the finished pic:

One surprise was I found my BB shell was damaged, perhaps from when I broke my chain a few months ago. (This is the part of the bike frame which holds the bearings the pedals spin around.) This didn't matter for the old crank set, but the new-fangled type press in from the outside and are sensitive to any imperfections. I thought about putting the whole frame on the milling machine and trying to face it myself, but decided to bring it to a bike shop. CycleLoft did a good job and charged me less than quoted over the phone. The more I read about troubles with these new BB designs, the happier I am that I did this. Here's the BB face before and after facing:

The other surprise is the weight difference is only 60g. "On paper" it looked like it would be bigger, but I found a lot of the difference is in the big chainring, which I don't use. The pictures below show the parts of each crankset that I did use, and is apples-to-apples.

A sub-part of the weight surprise is that the left crank is actually heavier in the new XT than the old LX crank, including the fasteners for the respective crank. XT is 227g, while old LX is 209. (XT is a higher-level line of components, so should typically weigh less than LX, and in general newer parts should be a little better than old ones.) The left crank does have a bigger job in the new design than the old one had: it maintains the preload on the BB bearings, so its joint slides for adjustment and then tightens in place. (The old design has the preload factory-adjusted in a single-piece BB component, and the crank arms just bolt on.)

In the end, it looks great and should work well. I am left with a bit of skepticism about the preload mechanism, though. The left crank is supposed to be periodically re-tightened, which makes it more fussy than the old design. I think I would hesitate to put this on my road bike, but the older designs are going out of production. Along the way I found I have a problem with the old-design (Octalink) left crank on Slushbike, though I think it will last a while. This has me a bit soured on the Shimano BBs at the moment. I've admired the Campagnolo "Ultra-torque" design, and at the moment it looks like the best to me. But Campagnolo isn't making triple cranks these days, so I can't use one. (Instead they're working on electronic shifting - ugh!)

Happy Holidays!

I hope you enjoyed your holidays. We had a good time, as you can see here with E sledding at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Thanks to my brother C and his kids for building a great set of runs and jumps!