Today not being a workday, I got out for a pleasant ride at a reasonable hour — my old Four Parks ride, which takes in Monument Valley, Goose Gossage, Pulpit Rock and Palmer Park. I wasn’t in any hurry to get home and spent a fair amount of time dicking around on the singletrack in Palmer Park, in the process discovering a trail that seemed entirely unfamiliar — the Kinnikinnick, just past the Council Grounds area.
I was on a ‘cross bike, my backup Steelman Eurocross, which was something like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There were some rocky bits I thought looked like the express lane to the ER, and June’s incessant rains had carved nasty V-shaped wheel-grabbers along a few loose descents. Everything was lined with flower-tipped cacti. Party time.
“Where the hell does this thing go?” I kept muttering to myself as I got on and off the bike.
And then I finally hit a junction I remembered. Hah. Comes the dawn. I’d ridden the Kinnikinnick before, but only on a mountain bike, and from the opposite direction. Duh. I will never be smart. I celebrated my sudden enlightenment by tearing off a quick piece of a trail I know backward and forward, the Grandview, and was rewarded with my favorite say-what stare from a couple of mountain bikers — “Is that dude on a road bike?”
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