A Mukluk Adventure

Today was for adventure.

Lately, we've been busy buying a house, getting ready to sell our current house, going to a funeral, having Christmas and whatnot. Today's calendar was blank, so I set out on a fat-tire ramble.

The trails were in really good shape, other than a little sand and patches of glare ice where the spring seeps come out onto the trail. This ice patch in the photo was so slick it was difficult to even stand on it. I made it about half-way across before executing a slow motion fall. If a cyclist falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, it does in fact make a noise, by the way.

The route was mostly trails, with just a little urban traffic riding to get around the airport. Mendota Bridge to Sibley House and the trail on that side of the river, west to Cedar Ave. and over the river, back east to the Refuge Headquarters and then north to Post Road and then on through Fort Snelling State Park. All told, it was 26.8 miles or so.

I was a little bonky at the end (should have eaten sooner) but otherwise it was a lot of fun. I have ridden all of this at one time or another, but never strung it together in this fashion. All in all, it worked very well other than getting lost in Fort Snelling cemetery.

I was impressed with the ambitiousness of the local beavers - they will be at this one a long time, but in the end, I think they'll prevail.

I was also impressed with the visible waterline on a lot of the trees in the river bottoms. The lighter gray shows where the water was during the epic floods last spring. That water line comes up to my neck - that's a lot of water. Thanks to the floods, this route is sandy, sandy, sandy. It looks like the trail was plowed to remove most of it, but it would be a slog on regular bike and do-able on a mountain bike. The fat-tires rolled over it with no problem though.

The warm weather and lack of snow made this a particularly nice day to be out - the river bottoms really do belong to the fat bikes this winter.