• Category Archives the sporting life
  • Biking, running, weights, yoga…

  • Autumn Leaves

    Nothing much to say here, I just thought I’d drop a few photos from the last day or so to show the fall colors. Last night our neighbors had a “roasted root” party, cooking potatoes, parsnips etc in their backyard fire pit, and today is the Halloween Parade; we’ll be doing a bike ride in costume beforehand. Fall is definitely here…


  • Kinda Sad Like the Autumn I Found, You See An Old Part Of Me’s Not Around

    Happy Fall, everybody!

    I went out for a ride on Tuesday, heading west/north along the towpath but only going as far as the Taylor House brewpub in Catasauqua — I wanted to check out the new section of improved trail.

    This was one of the few sections of trail left that had been open but unimproved (there is/was another one immediately north of this section, between Catty and Northampton, that also got fixed up recently), passable but still fun on a mountain bike. Much of the Lehigh Towpath was like this when I first started riding it, lo those many years ago. The trail is a pleasure to ride now, sure, but I miss those old days and the rougher, more “singletrack-ey” towpath. I only started riding this section north of Allentown maybe two years ago, and really enjoyed the feeling of being on “real trails” again, but hey that’s progress, and the new sections are actually pretty sweet. I believe the official ribbon cutting is today.

    Meanwhile, same as it ever was: my bottom bracket developed a creak again (this is the Santa Cruz), and so I took a look and found that both the crank bolt and the right bearing housing had loosened. I cleaned and greased and tightened them down pretty hard yesterday and did another towpath ride (towards Easton this time), and I think I got it solved. For now.

    When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,

    The phantom deer arise

    And all lost, wild America

    Is burning in their eyes.

    Stephen Vincent Benét, “Daniel Boone”

  • Meniolagomeka

    Meniolagomeka Memorial Stone

    Meniolagomeka (“fat land in the midst of scarcity”) was a small Lenape village near what is now Kunkletown, on the banks of the Aquashikola Creek just north of Blue Mountain at Smith’s Gap. The Moravians had converted many in the village, and eventually founded a mission station there, but some time after the Walking Purchase the natives were evicted by the colonial authorities, and the Moravians relocated them to Gnadenhuetten (Lehighton). The actual location was pretty much forgotten for a century, until the Moravian Historical Society rediscovered it and put up this memorial marker.

    The village is not far off the route of one of the more iconic local bike rides — among my crowd anyway; it’s part of the old Gap Gallop century ride, crossing Blue Mountain at Little Gap and returning via Wind Gap a dozen or so miles further down the ridge — but I had no idea anything like this was here until recently. After the week of kitchen disasters we just had, Anne and I both needed a big ride, so even though the Blue Mountain route doesn’t really follow many native paths, and the Meniolagomeka site does not figure prominently in my Native Paths project, I thought it would be neat to do the ride, and make an effort to find the old memorial stone.

    So that was the ride we did on Friday, with our friend Dwight H.

    Our ride took us up Township Line Road, through Bath and Moore Township, and out to Danielsville via the little roads that run south of the mountain. Blue Mountain Drive was being repaved and was down to one lane the whole way to the top, but the construction guys gave us some traffic assistance (and an audience) for the climb. We regrouped at the top, then bombed down the hill, past the ski resort and made the right onto Smith Gap Road.

    The memorial is on a road called Chestnut Ridge Road, a turn off Smith Gap Road (and pretty much at Smith Gap). We turned off our route, spent some time admiring Aquashikola Creek, and then rode a few hundred yards up the hill and found the stone — it was at the edge of a field, on what looked like private property but close to and easily visible from the road. We stopped, took some pictures and paid our respects, and then continued on our way. (We heard thunder so we weren’t sticking around.)

    The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, though we did get caught in a storm cell (a little cold rain actually felt good), and we also stopped at the “Snoopy Barn,” where Dwight took a few selfies. All told, we got in about 67 miles in just over seven hours. (I took about a mile off the beginning and end of the ride on my map, to preserve some privacy.)


  • Disentanglement

    This is the thirteenth (and last) in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    We stayed at the hostel again for our last night in Canmore. By this time I felt like an old hand, a hostel regular… In the morning we packed up and, since the driveway was under construction (thus inaccessible to taxis), we got a lift down the hill in the little hostel vehicle, or at least our bags did.

    Our Luggage Goes Down The Hill

    At the bottom of the hill we found that no taxis were available anyway, but we got a lift from yet another kind stranger with a pickup truck. Our benefactor dropped us off at the bike shop, where our bikes had been boxed and where they let us stash our bags for a few hours while we waited for the shuttle. We got one last walk around town before we left.

    The bike store owner got us to the shuttle stop, the shuttle got us to the Calgary Airport, and the hotel shuttle (barely) got us to the hotel — barely, because their big vehicle was in for service, and we could hardly fit with all our stuff into the minivan they showed up with.

    The hotel was busy, because everything was busy with the Calgary Stampede in town (it’s the biggest rodeo in North America), but even so, it was an airport hotel in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t much going on. A short walk to a nearby brewpub, and an early night, and an early morning flight for me (Anne’s flight would be the following day). Once again, the flight had some difficulties and delays, but the bike and I both made it to JFK in one piece.

    Bike Back On The Ground

    Julie picked me up from the airport, and let me know about the cell phone lot where she’d waited for my flight to arrive. This came in handy the next day, when I drove to JFK and picked Anne up…

    …and then we were home. We took a few days to rebuild the bikes, clean and stow our gear, and get rid of those bike boxes, but now it’s in the past. All in all, this was one of the best trips we’ve ever done, “ten out of ten, would do again,” in a heartbeat. I really enjoyed reminiscing, I hope you all enjoyed following along!


  • Canmore Days

    This is the twelfth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    Friday: A Goodbye To Julie

    Canmore was the end of the line for our bike tour. Anne and I had plans to stay a few days in town, but Julie would be heading home. We all stayed that first/last night at the Alpine Club hostel, which was beautiful, and which we (Anne and I) would return to later in the week. Some photos I took while I was drinking my morning coffee:

    That first photo is a shot of the iconic Three Sisters, and I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Rundle on the right in the second shot.

    Unfortunately, this was the end of our travel fellowship — Julie would be taking the shuttle from Canmore to Calgary, where she would catch her flight back home. Here she is with her bike boxed up and her bag packed, waiting for her ride to the shuttle pickup:

    Goodbye Julie

    Julie had to make her way (with all her stuff) from the bike shop to the shuttle pickup a mile away, but luckily Lyle (our Warm Showers host) had a pickup truck and offered to give her a lift, even though they weren’t expecting to have to host us until around 5:00. This was our first contact with Lyle, and the first but not the last time we got to experience his decency and hospitality.

    We would be staying for the next several days in Lyle and Kirsten’s home. Our plan was to arrive sometime early evening so we wouldn’t be in their hair all day, and so Anne and I did some more shopping and explored the town.

    We arrived at their home just around dinnertime, and found that they gave us their entire upstairs to use — it was almost a suite, complete with an incredible shower in the bathroom, almost like a cross between a rainforest and a steam bath. They made an incredible dinner, and we all hung out and got acquainted, chatting and comparing notes about biking and other sports, family, and former jobs (we were all retired). They were a very interesting couple. Lyle had been an engineer, but I think he played the game at a higher level than I did, and he’d had postings all over the world. They’d lived in Scotland, Germany, and Vietnam as well as Calgary. He was also a car enthusiast, and something of a gadgeteer, especially when it came to cooking: espresso machine, grill and smoker, sous vide cooker…

    Saturday: The Hike

    We woke up on Saturday, looking for something to do for the day, and our hosts suggested a hike. They had one particular hike in mind, one they liked but the trailhead was not nearby, so they offered use of their car to get there — their Porsche SUV. (They really did treat us like royalty.) Driving a Porsche sounds like fun, but I was terrified of damaging it, and the road to the trailhead turned out to be a twisty, unpaved mountain road, complete with mountain goats wandering around and licking up salt from the road…

    Well we made it to the trailhead without incident and started up the hill, though we weren’t 100% sure we were on the trail a lot of the time. I didn’t have my GPS and we had no topo map; all we had to show is the way was a guidebook page on my phone that I’d photographed earlier. The trail, or what we supposed was the trail, was more rugged than we expected, so we turned around before reaching the top. Oh well, but what we did of the hike was well worth it.

    For those following along at home, the trail we attempted was the Three Sisters Pass Trail. Some photos:

    Two Rides (Sunday and Monday)

    Anne and I had rented high end, full suspension mountain bikes in town, and once again our hosts hooked us up, this time showing us around the excellent riding near Canmore. The first day we rode from town, and did some trails called Horseshoe and G8, if I heard Lyle correctly.

    Anne had mechanical difficulties with her seatpost and went back to the rental place, and Kirsten was dealing with some wrist issues and had to bail, so for a good chunk it was just me and Lyle. We had a lot of fun, but it was all I could do to hold on to the pace — he was fast.

    Eventually we looped around, and Anne caught up with us, and we rode a bit more before her cursed rental bike had more troubles. At that point we just rode down the hill to a microbrewery where we met Kirsten. We hung out there for quite a while, and it was cool to see the place fill up with mountain bikers as time went on.

    Our second ride took us back out to where we hiked, and we did a point-to-point ride, complete with shuttles, on a section of the High Rocky Trail. We were joined by Lyle’s friend Dave, another strong rider, who also loaned Anne his wife’s bike.

    This was a great ride on some twisty, rolling singletrack, very different terrain and soil from back home but still reminiscent of places like Raystown. (Lyle told me that the trails had been made by machine, which would be a lot like Raystown). Dave was, if anything, even faster, and we all had a merry chase up and down the trail, occasionally yodeling and shouting to warn the bears off. This trail sort of paralleled the dirt road, which was next to a long thin lake, and every so often we came to a clearing with incredible views.

    On the way back to town we stopped at the Canmore Nordic Centre, where Lyle and Kirsten showed us around. The Nordic Centre is a provincial park in its own right, with mountain bike trails all through the woods, but it’s also their Olympic-level winter sports arena, the one that was built for Calgary ’88. (Lyle and Kirsten, and their kids, are all very athletic, and Lyle is an official in the Canadian national governing body for biathlon, a sort of mix of XC-skiing and shooting.) You could tell they really loved their town, with its bike trails and all its awesome facilities and amenities, and it was a pleasure to have them show it all to us.

    We came back to town and cleaned up, and then we all went out for pizza. This was our goodbye dinner with our hosts: we would be relocating back to the hostel for our last night in town. Moving on was a little sad, and they even offered to let us stay that one last night but we’d taken up enough of their time and hospitality, and we knew they had to get back to living their own lives.

    Our vacation wasn’t quite over, but it was starting to wind down.


  • Thursday: Banff to Canmore

    This is the eleventh in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    This was the day we left the parks and the parkways behind, and our final ride day together. We traveled down the Banff Heritage Trail, a bike path alongside the Trans-Canada Highway between the towns of Banff and Canmore…

    The bike path was pretty mellow, just a roll down the hill to the next town, and the vibe was a lot like any local rail-trail, with plenty of people doing what looked like their regular exercise and recreational, out-and-back rides. We were back in the real world, except that we were still surrounded by mountains and beautiful scenery, and wildlife was still a thing — Anne even saw a gray wolf at one point. Luckily it was on the other side of the Trans-Canada Highway’s wildlife protection fence, until we went a bit further and passed through a gate, back into the hungry wilderness… But it was a short ride for all that, and before we knew it we reached our final destination.

    Canmore

    Canmore had been a coal mining town until 1979 when the mines closed, and reconfigured itself for outdoor sports just in time to be a part of the 1982 Winter Olympics in Calgary — and that’s what put it on the map. It’s a beautiful town, just outside the national park and a tourist destination in its own right — mountain biking in summer, XC skiing in winter — but more charming and less crowded than the towns of Banff and Lake Louise. There was a considerable residential area, and a “real town” shopping district with supermarkets, hardware stores and so on, besides the more touristy “restaurant row,” which was closed to auto traffic and full of outdoor dining, souvenir stands and bike shops. Julie had an appointment at one of them (Outside Bikes) to drop her bike off for packing, and while we were there we got a recommendation for lunch/dinner at their go-to, a brewpub just around the corner. House-smoked brisket sandwiches and cold brews — delicious! After lunch we made our way to the Alpine Club Hostel, our lodging for the night. That was pretty much all she wrote for me, though I think Anne and Julie stayed up a bit later.

    Anyway, here are some shots from the day’s ride, and one photo I took from the porch of our hostel:


  • Wednesday: Lake Louise to Banff

    This is the eleventh in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    This would be our longest ride day. We would go just about 40 miles (luckily, they were easy miles) on the Bow Valley Parkway, from the hostel in Lake Louise to our campsite just outside Banff.

    The Bow Valley Parkway was very pretty, as pretty as the Icefields Parkway, and it was obvious we were coming into more temperate ecosystems — the plants were a little more like home, and a bit thicker on the ground too. The ride was mostly uneventful, but we did have to stop to let a young bear cross the road at one point. We rode on, stopping at scenic places with names like Morant’s Curve, Castle Mountain, Moose Meadows, and Vermilion Lakes

    Banff, the town itself, was considerably less idyllic and more hectic than the ride there. We stopped at the first place we saw (mistake), a Tim Horton’s (big mistake), and when we parked the bikes I saw a woman painting her be-stickered and graffiti-covered car with a paintbrush and gray house paint. I said hello (huge mistake) and she bombarded me with a torrent of pressured speech about the car and bad decisions, etc; we retreated into the Tim Horton’s, but it was a mob scene so we hopped back on our bikes and rode straight to our campsite, another mile or so up the road.

    This was Tunnel Mountain Village I, and it was awesome: a really big place but spacious and comfortable, with running water and showers and beautiful views everywhere. We showered, ate, took a walk around our new neighborhood, and fell back into our tents.


  • Tuesday: A Day At Lake Louise

    This is the tenth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    We had two overnights at the Lake Louise Hostel, and Tuesday was our day for exploring the area. The town of Lake Louise isn’t very big — some hotels, a few shops — but it is the hub for a lot of the more iconic things to do in Banff National Park; we chose to ride back to the lake, on the Tramway Trail rather than that twisty mountain road, and then hike from there up to the famous Tea House next to Lake Agnes. I’ll skip the bike maps for this since we just rode a few miles, but here are a few photos from the ride and our first view of Lake Louise:

    Lake Louise itself was beautiful, but the area immediately around it was incredibly crowded so we didn’t stick around, we just started to climb:

    I expected our day to be a leisurely ramble around a few lakes, followed by tea at some lonely, isolated bastion of decorum, maybe even some kind of Zen mountain retreat… Well there were lakes, and tea, but the “ramble” was decidedly more rugged than I was envisioning, and the trail to the tea house was extremely popular — I was constantly being surprised by the hardiness of our fellow tourists. There were children, and parents and grandparents, all cheerfully marching along with us up the ten percent grade (though the trail was smooth and wide, so it really wasn’t too bad), and we arrived at the tea house at what looked like the morning rush. We got our tea and some fresh baked pastries, and had our tea party along the lake. Here are some pictures from our hike up:

    The tea house itself was a marvel, without electricity or running water, and accessible only on foot, even for resupply. It was run by a bunch of cheerful, rugged young park interns, who were constantly baking more pastries and biscuits and selling tea as fast as they could hand it out. Things quieted down considerably after a short while, and when the crowd thinned out we did the same. (On the way back down to the lake, we actually ran into some of the people who helped Julie with the bus situation the day before.)

    Then we were back down at Lake Louise again, and I got some more shots of the lake, as well as of the luxurious old hotel, the Chateau Lake Louise:

    We walked back through the crowds and the buses and cars, and then rode the Tramway Trail back to town:

    We explored town some more, then made made dinner at the hostel. I personally crashed at this point, as my inner ear and sinuses were feeling pretty miserable.


  • Monday: Mosquito Creek to Lake Louise

    This is the ninth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

    We ate and packed up, and then we said goodbye to Mosquito Creek and our benefactor Tim. I got one last photo before we took off:

    Anne, Julie and Tim

    Our route continued downhill, from Mosquito Creek to the iconic mountain town of Lake Louise. This was our second-shortest ride day and probably our easiest, and the day we said goodbye to the Icefields Parkway.

    The day’s weather was pretty variable: sunny one moment and raining the next, but this was a pleasant ride, and it was over too soon. We came to the end of the Icefields Parkway, passing the huge line of cars lined up to get into the park and eventually coming to the end of our road. At this point we had to get on the Trans-Canada Highway — the main road through Canada, and basically the equivalent of an Interstate — and ride the shoulder through a tunnel to take the Lake Louise exit. We made it!

    Welcome To Lake Louise!

    Our lodgings were at the Lake Louise Hostel, which was modern, very nice, and similar to the one in Jasper except that it also had a really good restaurant. We were a bit early and couldn’t check in yet, but we were able to drop our stuff off, then we grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant and did some necessary shopping before checking in. Some photos of our first views of town — I took these at a picnic area behind the town shopping center, which was pretty much the whole town except for a few hotels:

    Anne and I opted for showers and a nap, while Julie rode up to the actual lake. The weather continued to deteriorate…

    We got up, then got a hi-top table at the hostel’s restaurant — the equivalent of their bar, and the only spot we could get without a reservation. We got a beer and ordered some shared plates. We were into our second beer and wondering if we should send out the Mounties to go find Julie when we saw her come into the hostel, looking like a drowned rat. She went to shower and change, then met us at our table. We ordered dinner, hi-top or no, and heard her tale: it seems the ride from town to the actual lake is up a steep, curvy mountain road, and when she got there it was a tourist madhouse — she estimated 10,000-15,000 people in all. The it started to rain in earnest and all the other tourists started to leave, and she decided that she would take a bus back to town, the tiny road just wasn’t safe with all those people and the rain. She got on the bus line with the thousands who were doing the same, befriended her neighbors in line and got to know them, found out that she needed money for the bus so her new friends gave her the $2.00 fare, and eventually she got down the mountain and here she was! We drank a toast to her Canadian benefactors.