Typical GORC rest day

Tuesday in Salida, GORC takes an easy day. This means we go to Alpine Tunnel, which is about three miles from the highest place you can park, along steady uphill rail-to-trail. This is not KATY trail, but an old narrow-guage railway that's been out of commission since 1910. The tunnel under the continental divide is closed so you have to hike or hike a bike to get to the other side. Narrow guage trains can climb much steeper than what we're used to, at least 5%. SO, at the town of St. Elmo's we're leaving a truck for later. About eight of us decide (stupidly) to ride the six miles to the high parking place, then ride the rest with GORC. Then we get to the tunnel, then hike on up to the continental divide, and see why Bryan "The Crusher" Adams chose the truck ride up. After 20 minutes of hike-a-bike, then huddling behind a rock for 15 minutes taking picures and cowering from the wind, the last five dumbasses take what we called the "hell and back" trail, which was a beautiful piece of little-used singletrack, most of it above 12,000 feet. Anyway, since we're on dialup out here, the pictures aren't plentiful. Here's a shot of Big Pun at the mouth of the Alpine Tunnel. Big Pun and Matt Hayes are not bound by earth's laws of physics. Somehow those guys can dish out the punishment, take more of it, and keep coming back for more. Both killed it today. Here's a rare shot of Greg taking a little breather at the mouth of the tunnel.


By the way, the first keg is long dead, so we got a bigger one for the second. It just might kill us.

No links today. I'm on vacation.

Rain N Shine

So it decides to rain on us after we arrived in Salida on Saturday. We had some keg and waited for the sun to reappear. As soon as it did we put together a haphazard ride out the door onto some local fireroads to Boss Lake. As we ascended it began to rain and the crew turned around and stopped at a local business (see photo). It let up and we attempted to climb the heinous fireroad. Scott, Matt and Ron made a left turn, leaving the others to their own fate. It began to hail and it hurt like hell. Ron and Matt stopped under a tree to make sure they were saturated with as much rain water before continuing. Kirby showed up and the 3 continued up a monster fireroad.

It never stopped raining and the temperature continued to drop. Lighting and thunder followed us up the steep hillside for over a mile until we crested onto Boss Lake. The fireroad literally ended in the lake waters and we had to skirt the bank until we reached uberknarl singletrack similar to the Worlds SS course.

We bombed down the wet and slimy trail, walking the blood prone sections, and landed on another fireroad back to basecamp. Kirby, Matt and Ron bombed the descent, absolutely frozen and soaked to the core.

Though only 3 of the 15 completed the first challenge of the week, it was a ride to be remembered by all.

GORC Socks

Here's the design for the GORC socks. All proceeds go back into the club for supporting your local trails. Ordering details will be on the website. Buy a pair of these 100% wool socks for yourself, and one for grandma, she'll love them.

God hates Castlewood

OK, that's no way to put it. God loves castlewood. He just has to let mother nature lay the smack down every now and then or there would be great unrest upstairs.




I was talking to Sam last night and he told me about some cool maps and storm descriptions on the NOAA website. Turns out the storms of August 13 were pretty notable, as evidenced by the manually drawn map of the five strong downbursts that hit the area that day. There are a lot of cool storm damage pictures there too (like the one below). To see other weather events around here you can just go to the abundantly useful St. Louis weather page (not the forecast) and click "recent events" on the left side of the page.



Unfortunately for us they hit Castlewood dead on and put a lot of trees down over the trail. Sam said he and the rangers "have never seen anything like it." One thing I learned in the old-growth forests of the porcupine mountains is that down trees are a great thing for the forest. They're not so good for the trails which are completely unusable right now.

That's why they're calling for help cleaning up. People who know what they're doing with chainsaws are doubly appreciated but anyone can be put to work.
Meet on Sunday August 21, 9:00 am at the Castlewood ranger station. See the gorc message board for more details.

LINKS GALORE:
August 13 event
Cool Aug 13 downburst map
Aug 13 Storm damage pictures
St. Louis weather central page
St. Louis recent signifigant weather events
Chat about trail cleanup
wikipedia entry for downburst