The only way to get better is practice, right? With that in mind, and having Friday off to use up an extra vacation day… I decided to go poke around Ganaraska and try to learn the forest by myself.
I pulled out of the parking garage around 6:30am on Friday, which put me at the P2 entrance around 8:15 (give or take a few minutes to gas up). Maybe that was a bit early… since most of the ride there was through fog along Taunton road. That meant a fine mist of water on my goggles, and generally being a bit cool and damp the whole way there. But I had the forest to myself, and some nice views from some of the higher points:
Still, next time I could leave an hour later and let some of the fog burn off 🙂
At first I stopped often, trying to reconcile the forest map I bought with the GPS… trying to actually put some thought in how to navigate the trails. But it turned out to be more fun to just wander about using the GPS to tell me direction and give the “big picture” view of where I was in the West Forest. Follow a forest road until I found double-track trails… follow them until I found single-track… and watch the little dots on the GPS to make sure I was heading someplace new. And stop to have a drink and nibble on a snack bar whenever I felt like it:
Around 10:30-11am I decided to swing back to the entrance, mostly to make sure I could find it, and to take a break. While I was there Randy, Connie, and Rudy found me, looking for some other ODSC members. After taking a break I ended up joining them. And we spent the next few hours riding together through various trails and trying some hillclimbs (I only tried the one large sandhill… and it took me 3 tries to get 90% up it before looping the bike and throwing myslef into the sand 🙂 )
Here’s Randy and Connie at lunch on their TEs…
…Rudy on his DR:
…and Chris and Alex on their RMs:
I didn’t take many pictures while out with them, but Randy took some and posted them to the site. You can see where I dumped the bike in the sand… too tired at the moment to even pick it up 🙂
I left the group around 2pm, which got me back home around 4, a good time to take the dog out for a walk since she had been indoors all day. I had a great time riding with some new friends, and the Ganny seems a little less mysterious than it did before!