Peacocks and Chinchillas

We had a week-long break at the end of March, so we decided to drive from Brevard, NC (our last visit before our break) to Savannah, GA, and work our way up the coast, ending up around Havelock, NC (our next visit). We searched for singletrack in Savannah and found it at the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, rife with alligators, wild hogs, birds and armadillos (and plenty more, I’m sure). It was mostly doubletrack among the swamp, but very fun. We got to see lots of wildlife that most people never get to see, which leads me to believe that not too many people make it out to the refuge, a bummer.

Levee Singletrack

Gators in there

Then we headed up the coast and hiked along the way at the Sandpiper Trail (south or Myrtle Beach, just drive through that town, don’t stop), and after that (and a quick overnight in Wilmington, NC, super cute town on the coast), we spent a week in the Outer Banks. We took the ferry from Beaufort to Ocracoke, and Ocracoke was by far our favorite island – beach-y charm but without the toursity feel, a few great restaurants and shops, bike path all along the island, and beautiful beaches. My favorite memory was riding along the beach and seeing pods of dolphins scamper down the coast.

Ocracoke beach

The further north you go in the Outer Banks (by car and far), the more touristy it gets because you’re getting closer to major population centers. We still rode a bit on our way to Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills, but those places weren’t as charming. There’s fairly good beach camping (just make sure you’re not in a tornado’s path, or you’ll have to wake up at 5:15 a.m. and quickly pack up your tent and go to shelter…speaking from experience) and great wildlife refuges to see. I’m sure that in the summer you’d be kept busy all day long with surfing, SUP’ing, kayaking and swimming. We’d definitely go back to Ocracoke in the high season to take advantage of the heat and activities.

OB camping

Steve made this loaf of bread. With this recipe. Incredibly easy.

Some of the most delicious bread I've ever had.

Two weeks ago we found a kitten on our family farm in Illinois. Thinking it was a boy, we promptly named it Clyde. When we found him, he was emaciated, had cuts on his face, had a cold, had dirty ears and fleas, missed his mama, had a limp, and was generally a wreck. But we’ve (by we, I mean mostly Steve’s mom, since we’re working and are only at the farm a few days this month) been nursing him back to health. We confirmed last week that he’s a boy, about 8-12 weeks old, and aside from the fleas and the cold, is in for a happy life! We’re currently on a mission to get my mom in Colorado to adopt him.

Here are some gratuitous kitten shots.

We’ve worked in 13 states and ridden in 20 so far this year, adding Minnesota to this list this past weekend. You can imagine that we see every imaginable landscape through our travels and we happen to find natural beauty and value in all of them – even across I-70 through Kansas, or in the swampy bogs of Louisiana.

Sweet new singletrack in Grand Marais

We didn’t have to try hard to find natural splendor in Grand Marais. Talk about scenery: grandiose vistas over sea-like Lake Superior, paper birches and pines that frame every panorama, glacial water bodies begging for a quick dip of your gams, giant ferns and their tightly clenched fronds littering Technicolor-green meadows, and water that meanders through it all.

Paper birch and Steve working

A place where you’d expect singletrack trails, naturally. But the main recreation opportunities in this northeast section of Minnesota involve water: canoeing the Boundary Waters, sailing Lake Superior, kayaking the waterways that feed it. Not too much skinny trail to speak of, but the Superior Cycling Association and the Superior National Forest are changing that.

Workin'

A collaborative project between the bike club and the Forest Service started a few years ago as a way to increase singletrack in the Forest and create more dirt-based tourism opportunities in Grand Marais, an otherwise snowed-in town that sees most of tourism between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The Forest Service located funding sources to have professional trail builders lay out almost 20 miles of intermediate-level flowy singletrack in the woods. Now that the project is ready to be cut into the ground, over 100 Boy Scouts are coming to town this week to help build it.

Mink Lake

For the adventure-seeking, you can already string together hundreds of miles of logging roads, dirt roads and doubletrack  in the Superior National Forest (trust us, we found out the hard way). The riding will be all the sweeter with the new singletrack close to town.

Advocacy isn’t for everyone. However, in times of need, advocacy can mean as little as showing up to support a mass of people that all want the same thing. Please take two hours out of your day tomorrow to show up as a biker who supports the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance’s proposal to provide reasonable and responsible access for bikes on the City of Boulder’s trails, and reverse this ban. This is the most important meeting you could go to on this issue.

On January 23, 1983, mountain bikes were banned in Boulder. Tomorrow, after years of meetings, deliberations, collaborative processes and both positive and negative decisions, is the very last public input meeting in front of the Boulder City Council to basically reverse this ban. The more mountain bike access supporters who show up at this meeting, the more effective we will be in expressing our desire for equal recreation rights and access.

A community speaks louder than just a few people.

Of the handful of people who read this blog, I’m sure that there’s one of you who likes to ride bikes in Boulder. I have a favor to ask! Since I cannot be in Boulder to show up in person, I would like you to go for me. It’s at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15 (tomorrow), at 1604 Arapahoe Avenue (Boulder).

If you can’t go, sign the petition or email the City Council. Here are more suggestions from BMA on how to be active in this debate. It’s important to me that you be involved.

Crazy bench cut along a gully

When: February 17 – 20

Where: Fort Yargo State Park, Winder, Georgia

Who: Yargo Area Biking Association (YABA), Georgia State Parks

What: Designed and built a reroute of a 700-foot fall-line section of trail that was becoming significantly rutted, through a pine forest with typical Georgia red clay. The new section maintains the climb but along a longer, 1000-foot section.

Color Commentary: Our IMBA blog post for that weekend tells the story of the Gordon brothers, without whom the trails there would not exist. I loved riding there, since my favorite kind of riding is a 10-15 mile loop in different kinds of ecosystems, that takes advantages of views, access to water, and topography. For the building, we were joined by a group of 20 people sentenced to community service, which was interesting, to say the very least.

My brother-in-law, Scott, competed in the Freeskiing World Tour in Snowbird this past week. He didn’t make the finals, but made the highlight reel! Which is just as important. Check out his jump (the first featured one) at minute 1:52 (wearing the blue and yellow). Pretty awesome!

Day One Qualifier Highlights: Snowbird 2011 from Subaru Freeskiing World Tour on Vimeo.

I told Steve I needed beach time, so we went to Barbados. I suppose we could have gone to Florida, or the Georgia coast, but when the time is right, and the funds are available, go big or go home, I guess.

I posted and tagged my pictures on flickr. There’s something for everyone! Adventure hikes through the jungle, beaches, colorful homes…

Virgina is for lovers? Maybe. On Sunday, Virginia was for famished people. Ask your wife – when women are hungry, they are HUNGRY and not afraid to be curt about it. We drove through the state today on our way to the National Bike Summit. If we’re on a long drive, and it’s between 12 and 2, the task falls to me (as the non-driver) to Yelp and UrbanSpoon my way to a good restaurant. By the time Steve mentions food, we’re usually both pretty hungry, which doesn’t do much for inter-marital relationships.

Restaurants are a crap-shoot on Sundays. Most are closed and those that are open are shi-tay (worse case scenario: baked potato at Wendy’s). I swear, a miracle came upon us this Sunday, as we approached Staunton, Va.: Zynodoa. I have never been happier to be in a high-quality, local restaurant as I was today. It reminded me of The Kitchen in Boulder — a chalkboard listing the local meat, fish and produce purveyors; large windows and a small but focused menu.

We were starving, thinking we’d have to ingest crap food to stay awake and totally not expecting any restaurant of our standard to be open. Then we found ourselves in a sunny booth window, waiting for our local Virginia fare.

I don’t drink coffee, I rely on fruit juice in the morning and eat a steady supply of fruit and veggies to keep me perked during the day. The past few days, I’ve had plenty of fine food, but not enough bright food and I got crabby and tired. I needed bright foods. Zynodoa was a godsend: bibb lettuce/kale/beet salad. This was followed by my favorite kind of entree, a creative vegetarian main dish: sauteed oyster mushrooms with a potato turnip puree and garlic crostini. I don’t care what you call it, I appreciate good food, it makes me happy. Someone put thought into this food, and that’s my kind of meal and exactly what I needed.

Again, a small miracle.

Chuck Huck

When: February 10 – 13, 2011

Where: Birmingham and Pelham, Alabama

Who: Birmingham Urban Mountain Peddlers (BUMP), Alabama State Parks

What: The local club, BUMP has been working with the land managers at Oak Mountain State Park (a phenomenal model for a state park, with recreational opportunities that would meet everyone’s needs and provide incentive for outdoor-newbies to get outside) to build more singletrack in the park, including new singletrack around the existing dirt roads that riders use. We built about 1,000 of new trail around the dirt access road.

Color Commentary: I wrote all about how good of a job BUMP does in their advocacy work in my IMBA blog post. This club is a model sustainable club, and a good example for anyone wanting to increase their trail access.