Disjointed Mohican Ride

The weather for the past couple weeks has been predictable: "scattered thunderstorms" pretty much sums it up.  Every time it seems like we'll have some dry weather another wave of wet comes through.  Knowing we may encounter a course too wet to ride, and with another forecast for "scattered thunderstorms", Ryan and I headed down to Mohican first thing in the morning.

As we pulled into the MTB parking lot we found Ryan O'Dell at his truck.  He talked about the course condition and 4" of rain that fell in a single day.  On this morning he was heading out with volunteers to do trail maintenance a couple miles into the course.  Sometime in the future I'd like to help with trail maintenance and now I know who leads such work.

Post ride down tube adornment.

Knowing people were working a couple miles into the course Ryan and I decided to drive to the snow mobile parking area (MTB parking #2) and start our ride from there.  I liked this plan as it would let me ride the only portion of the course I had not yet ridden, miles 15 to 23. 

For the first mile or two I'm trying to remember if I ever pedaled.  It was fast, flowing trail that was mostly downhill through pine forest with ferns all about.  Pretty fun and a good way to warm up.  At this point it takes me a little bit of offroad riding to get the feel, but I imagine that will improve with experience.  There were a couple short rock gardens and down hill corners to test me as the miles went on and I felt pretty good, but several uphills got the best of me.  I wasn't doing so well at keeping weight forward and kept loosing my front wheel.  In retrospect I think I was being too much of a road cyclist and pulled on the bars as I climbed to generete power.  This had the negative effect of unweighting the front wheel.  I'll have to work on that.

At the suggestion of Ryan O'Dell we didn't ride the final couple miles of trail along the campground, he said this section we still pretty wet.  Instead, we rode through the campground to get to SR3 and then road SR97 back to where we started.  We road down the road to covered bridge before plowing back into the woods for the climb up Mt. Doom.  At the bottom of the climb I had more problems weighting the front of the bike but I started to figure it out midway.  After the climb was once again fun blasting through the woods.  I remembered really liking this section the last time.

Post ride shoes.

Returning to the parking lot where we started, we caught up to four guys from Michigan.  They were from the Detroit area and had come down to stay in a cabin and ride mountain bikes for a couple days.  Hearing that these guys drove 4-5 hours to ride here made me feel fortunate to have Mohican just 20 minutes down the road from my house.  I'll have to make it a point to help out with trail work one of these days.