Commando Trails

The weather has been great all week and the urge to ride the trails is becoming overwhelming, I even wore shorts to work on Friday it was so nice. I know that soon we will be in the heart of summer with endless days of trail riding and these days of hoping the trails will be ride able will be a past memory. But for now I ready to get more miles on the trails!

Tonight and Sunday are calling for rain, so any chance of trail riding is out the window for tomorrow. This morning I had reserved myself to at best a road ride with the Hermann crew Sunday afternoon or possibly the dread rollers if it rained all day. Granted I would get caught up on this season of 24 while on the rollers, but that still did not motivate me much.

As the day went on today good fortune came my way as Dawndi and I finished up our work in STL early giving me an opportunity to get my planned 3 hour ride in today vs Sunday.

So what to do? Road ride, check and see if the new trail Shaun and I have been working on was dry, gravel ride.... what to do? I made some calls to the Hermann crew to see what they were doing, all were up to other things with the exception of Shaun. Shaun was actually on his way to test out the new trail we are working on. Called back and said it was not dry yet, bummer.

So I said, let's go out to Daniel Boone Conservation Area (pdf) and see how the tails out there are.

When I first moved to Hermann just about three years ago I found this trail. It's mostly used by horses and hikers. I adopted the trail and began to clear it of leaves, logs and other stuff. After many hours I had the thing fully ridable at full speed. Well one thing led to another and I stopped working it.

Now several years later back on the trail, it has returned to the same poor shape it was in when I first found it. Trail is back to commando style riding with leaves, sticks, washouts, logs and big rocks under leaves that you can't see. You have to point the front wheel forwward to go.

Despite everything, we were riding trail and loving every minute of it.