| Yaaa-aa-ahhh-h! I didn't bring a camera! Right at the boundary
of the Bitterroot National Forest, as I was checking the "no motor
vehicle" sign and thinking about taking a water break, a very large
bull moose came out of the woods toward the creek and spotted me about
the same time I spotted him. I moved to put my bike and the steel
vehicle barricade between me and the moose. After a reasonable time,
when both of us realized the other one wasn't going to be threatening,
he moved off down stream and I crossed to the other side of the
barrier and continued uphill. The trail to the dam was nominally a
"jeep trail" but detoured around private properties in several
places, with the requisite step stones and runoff deflector logs.
Good thing the bike shoes have mud treads. After the last cabin, the
road resumed, but deteriorated to a true jeep road--we're not talking
a Grand Cherokee here, but a battle-scarred 1943 Willys with a winch
mounted on the front. Full-time four-wheel drive required. My
two-wheeler with rear-wheel drive only got dragged up steep loose
sand and rock, for about two-thirds of the trail |
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| On this first day of Fall, the
reservoir, my destination for today, was empty. Not dry, as the
creek continues to run through it, and the lakebed was still soft
mud. Had a good lunch, views up the valley, and headed back
down. And down. I should have remembered that, if I couldn't get
traction uphill, I wouldn't have any braking downhill, either.
Shortly after meeting one of many horse trains that use this trail
regularly (leading to loose trail surface, no doubt), this trivial
observation was made painfully obvious, when the trail pitched over
to double-digit slope and turned to a solid field of death cookies
and loose sand. The bike bounced from rock to rock, accelerating
under full freefall between rocks, until rocks knocked the front wheel
one way, the rear wheel another, neither the direction I was going.
The man-bike system unraveled under the meticulous application of
several laws of physics, resulting in the immediate suspension of the illusion of free will, and I began to form a damage control plan in the few
milliseconds it took to release all the kinetic energy built up in
the whirling mass of 140 kilos of fat, bone, steel, rubber, and a few
grams of polystyrene foam. Tucking in knees and elbows, I felt the
burn of road rash on my right forearm and shin and a sharp jolt in my left
wrist as I jabbed the ground with a padded glove to avoid a face
plant, followed by the popping of hundreds of tiny styrene bubbles in
my helmet and the much lounder crunching of compressed ear cartilage
as I completed a header into a football-sized rock. Everything
stopped, and my vision suddenly blurred, causing a bit of
consternation until I spotted a curiously curved and oddly shaped piece
of glass on the trail ahead: the right lens of my glasses. After a
short stop to repair my glasses with the knife blade of my trusty
Leatherman tool, I realigned the handlebars with the front wheel,
cleaned up the yard sale, and continued down the
trail, much more cautiously. Oh, I did leave a note on the
stove when I left this morning, so when Judy got home on Monday night,
she would know where to send the search party. But, I survived: this
time. |
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