Tag: Tramway Road

Rolling on the river (and elsewhere)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The turnaround point, just south of Interstate 40 along the Paseo del Bosque trail.

It was a bit premature, but I rode my age yesterday and then some.

The final tally was 44.6 miles, or 71.8 kilometers; I only needed 43.5 miles to make 70km, but I figure the additional mile and change constituted a punishment tax for being a wuss and riding my age in kilometers instead of miles.

My 70th birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but the forecast was not promising and yesterday’s weather looked (and was) superb, so I took a cue from Janis Joplin and got it while I could.

I’ve been in something of a rut lately, literally as well as figuratively. The drill has been to break out a cyclocross bike and ride a mix of roads and trails, the latter slashed into tire-grabbing ribbons by fatheads who shred (or stir) the gnar-gnar after a wet spell. The ruts they leave behind don’t pose a problem for anyone piloting a double-squishy with plenty of travel and 3-inch tires, but can be a tad jarring on a rigid drop-bar bike with 33mm rubber.

Still, it beats working, especially if I pick a day and hour when the usual suspects are likely to be hoeing a row in the cube farm. I managed 24 miles of that sort of thing on Thursday. But doubling up on that, on a Friday, sounded like a punishment tour, not a birthday celebration. Also, too much of the same-ol’, same-ol’.

What to do; what to do. …

Temps looked to be headed for the 60s, with wind from the west. Coasting down to the bosque would force me to commit to some proper distance while giving me plenty of options in case advancing age or some other wrinkled catastrophe reared its ill-considered comb-over in midride. Off I went.

It’s mostly off-street bike path (Arroyo del Oso) and downhill from the intersection of Tramway and Manitoba to the bike-ped bridge over I-25, barring a short, unpleasant stretch of Osuna between the western end of the Arroyo del Oso golf course and Brentwood.

But once I’m on the bridge it’s all bike path, all the time, depending upon how I choose to head home.

I’m prone to overdo and bad at math, so after following the North Diversion Channel Trail and the Paseo del Norte Trail to the Paseo del Bosque, I refused to be lulled into complacency by the early greenery, stifled various miles-enhancing impulses — Hang a right at I-40 and climb to 98th? Hang a left at Mountain and cruise past Old Town back to the NDCT? Continue south to Rio Bravo? — and pulled a U at Mountain, heading back to the NDCT the way I’d come.

I thought I’d get more vertical than this, but that bosque trail is flatter than a Republican’s head.

The wind was mostly with me, so it felt like the right call, not least because it was all uphill back to El Rancho Pendejo. The question was: Which way back?

Arroyo del Oso is kind of a slog if ridden up from NDCT, with lots of stop and go plus a couple-three evil multiple-lane, median-divided, high-speed baby-highway crossings to negotiate with pale, failing, nearly-70-year-old legs. And my limited math skills seemed to indicate the mileage — kilometerage? — wouldn’t make the nut.

So I hung a left where the Paseo trail met the NDCT and headed northeast through Balloon Fiesta Park, where a few didoes through an underused office/light industrial ghetto connect to the Pan American Freeway, which in turn leads to the climb up Tramway — if you don’t mind riding a short stretch of shoulder alongside Pan American against high-speed, one-way traffic, which I kind of do. There’s been talk for years about extending the NDCT north to Roy, which would spare cyclists this game of chicken, but no action as of yet.

A quick digression: As I was rolling through the balloon park en route to doing battle with Pan American I saw a dude on what looked to be a gravel bike who’d left the official trail to drop down into La Cueva channel, a drainage like NDCT only without a bike path along the edge.

It made me wonder if, rather than risking the short against-traffic dash to Tramway from Balloon Fiesta Parkway, a savvy cyclist might be able to ride La Cueva channel underneath Pan American and I-25 all the way to Louisiana, then climb out somehow and head north to Elena, a less harrowing alternative to the 50-mph traffic of Tramway. Never saw the other dude again, so, maybe? To be continued. …

I took my chances on the Pan American shoulder, cautiously skirting two parked vehicles that may have had some unfortunate interaction — one car, one 18-wheeler — and started the half-hour ascent of Tramway to The County Line Bar-B-Q.

This is where the age thing manifested itself. A couple skinny young pups on them plastic-fantastic whirligigs with the disco brakes and what have you passed me so fast I had to stop to check my pulse, see if I still had one.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and upon hitting the stop sign at the barbecue joint it was clear that if I headed straight home I was going to wind up a couple klicks short of the full megillah. Thus I had to add a couple curlicues, flourishes, and do-si-dos to my little dance party before I could leave the floor and collapse into a medium-heavy lunch.

The official high was 69°, four degrees above normal. If that’s my birthday present, I’ll take it.

• Postscript: Lest anyone consider this even marginally impressive, my man the M-Dogg out in California reports having covered 9,000 feet of vertical and 166 miles in four days, none of which was his birthday.

Blockade

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

The road isn’t exactly closed. More like not there at all.

Right-wing antivaxxer Canadian trucker nutjobs? Nope. Just another road that goes nowhere by design.

This one butts up against Sandia Pueblo land, between Balloon Fiesta Parkway and Roy Avenue, which becomes Tramway Road NE just past Interstate 25.

It would be convenient to be able to press on to Roy via San Mateo. But you know how the white man is. Give him a bike path and the next thing you know he’s grabbed the whole damn’ country.

So I roll up to the Pan American Freeway and hang an illegal left turn, riding about a quarter-mile to Roy/Tramway on the west shoulder, against traffic.

Frankly, I don’t relish doing this. It gives ammo to the haters (“Look at that douche on the bicycle riding against traffic!”). And it gives me a small jolt of The Fear, because Pan American just south of Roy/Tramway is half frontage road, half interstate on-ramp, and I don’t care to become a hood ornament on an accelerating F-350 whose driver can barely see over the hood when he’s sober.

But there’s a nice wide shoulder — full of debris from previous mishaps, natch — and anyway, it’s the cost of doing velo-business in that neighborhood. So there you have it.

The payoff is the gradual, mostly uninterrupted, half-hour climb up Tramway to the stop sign at The County Line Grill & Smokehouse. There’s just one stoplight, at the casino just east of I-25, so you can just pick a gear and roll it.

Wave at the buffalo herd as you pass. Just don’t try to roller-skate through it. Because you can’t.

Alto

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Temps remain a bit below normal in the Duke City, but you don’t have to shovel cool.

Stop? Not me.

It was a gorgeous St. Patrick’s Day in the Duke City, and everybody and his/her granny was out and about, trying to sweat out the remnants of Gaelic brain eraser.

I awarded myself a day off from riding other people’s bikes and used one of my own, the Steelman Eurocross pictured in yesterday’s post.

The great thing about a ’cross bike — the original gravel bike, don’t you know — is that you can ride it pretty much anywhere. And that’s exactly what I did. Pavement, good and bad; singletrack; two-track, whatever.

For instance, it’s great fun to zip down Tramway Road from Juniper Hill, pull a U at the bottom, and ride back up the gullied trail that parallels it instead of grinding along next to the hordes of goggling tram-bound tourists.

It would be easier on a modern gravel bike, like Salsa’s Journeyman Claris 650, with its 2.1-inch 650b’s and low end of 30×34. The Steelman maxes out at 700×33 and a bottom of 36×28.

But if God wanted our lives to be easier He wouldn’t have given us Il Douche.

Shiny side up, please

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

The Bianchi Zurigo, with its oversized alloy tubes, 30mm V-section rims and broad-bladed carbon fork, catches a little more wind than some of the other bikes in the fleet.

The bike was moving around on me in the crosswind as I swept down Tramway Road toward Interstate 25, and I was starting to think that the Bianchi Zurigo Disc, with its fat alloy tubes, broad-bladed carbon fork and skinny 700×35 adventure tires, might not have been the right tool for today’s job.

There’s nothing out there to keep the wind off you, except for the cars passing too close and too fast, and the Bianchi is both a little small and a little stretched out for Your Humble Narrator, who is too lazy to give it a stem more appropriate to his wizened, shrunken carcass.

So there I was, bowling along at speed, thinking back to the time I got into a death wobble on a long, smooth descent at the Air Force Academy, when I noticed three brother cyclists off their machines just ahead, and taking up a not insubstantial portion of the shoulder, too.

I slowed down to ask if they needed anything, and that’s when I noticed the irregular black stripe leading off the shoulder and into the terra not so firma.

“Everything OK?” I asked, coming to a stop.

“I don’t know yet,” replied rider No. 1, the one wearing the fresh road rash. “I hit my head pretty hard.” At that, No. 2 inspected No. 1’s helmet while No. 3 checked the victim’s bike. There was a divot in the lid and a big oval hole in the rear tire, as though some strong fellow had taken a Magnum potato peeler to it. There was some discussion of “shimmy.”

The gent with the dent had that look on his face, the one that says, “This has fucked up my Sunday, and it’s starting to hurt, but at least I went off into the weeds and not out into traffic, where a helmet would have been tits on a bull, or more like tits on a bumper, now that I think about it, which I’d rather not.”

I asked if he needed a phone, but he had one, and dialed up the wife for a dustoff.

“You guys seem to have this under control,” I said to the others, and off I rolled, dialing my sensor array up to maximum. “Wind from the SW, roger. Land yacht off the port stern, check. Does that rear tire feel a little soft?” That sort of thing.

I haven’t had a good high-speed getoff in a while, not even when I got into that death wobble on the AFA, and I’d like to keep it that way.

What we like and what we get are often two very different things, though. So let’s all be careful out there. The world is full of hard surfaces and sharp edges.