Greensfelder

Now that I'm a half dozen entries into this blog (which triples the number of the last one I did a half dozen years ago), I fear that some of these entries are starting to get repetitive.  Since my last entry, I've been out twice, and guess what?  One of them was to Lost Valley.  I promise you, once daylight lasts until 6:00 or 6:30, you probably won't hear a thing about LV.  That is, unless I decide to race the Lost Valley Luau.  I wanted to race that last year, but it had the misfortune of being rained out twice.  I like Lost Valley and all, but since it's the only place where you can ride at night, I have to go there if I want to get a ride in after work during the winter.  Plus, it has gravel, so even when the single track is a sloppy mess, you can still get a ride in most of the time.  I spend a lot more time at Matson and Greensfelder during the summer.  Also, from this blog it sounds like I'm on my mountain bike way more than my road bike.  While I am starting to like the off road scene more and more (and my one race to date was a MTB race), to date, I have put almost 3 times as many miles on my road bike than my mountain bike since I bought the road bike.  That might change this year, but we'll see. 

Amazingly, I did get out on Saturday before the warming temperatures turned Greensfelder Park into (from reports on Sunday) a sloppy mess.  After lounging around Saturday morning, my wife dropped the kiddos off with Grandma and went into work for a few hours and I got off my butt and drove over to the park.  I got in one lap on my standard loop there, which is DeClue from the main parking lot counterclockwise to Deer Run, then down into Eagle Valley and up to the Visitor's Center and back to my car.

Looking down towards Six Flags.  I could see the Screaming Eagle when I took this picture, but my camera doesn't seem to always catch what I think it should.

I had decided to take my hardtail out that day, mostly because my odometer reset and got miscalibrated on my full suspension bike a couple months ago and I've been lazy about fixing that.  Being the numbers geek that I am, I don't want to ride and not know exactly how far I've gone, so the FS bike is sitting in the garage for now.  However, this is now the third or fourth time I've ridden Greensfelder on my hardtail, and I am getting to the point where I almost feel I can do better with the hardtail.  Heck, my brakes weren't even working very well Saturday (they were fried after the Berryman trip) and I still didn't regret not having the other bike with me.

Good thing I can see without these on.  At least to drive - don't make me read the newspaper though!

One of these days I need to man up and go out for a second lap, but with the bad brakes, it was not going to be today.  Plus the south facing areas were getting a little soft the first time through, and I didn't want to start making ruts on the trail.  So I got in the car and immediately had my glasses fog up, went home, got cleaned up, and took my bike to my favorite mechanic at Maplewood Bicycle and had new pads installed.  

Getting those pads and the cables tightened made all the difference when I went out to Lost Valley last night.  Even the gravel was a little mushy, so there was no singletrack to be had, but at least I got my gravel lap in, and as an added bonus, I was able to complete the loop without turning my light on!  I was charging it at work after lunch, and left work initially with it on the charger, so after crossing the Daniel Boone Bridge, I had to swing back around to my office to grab it, but it turned out that I didn't need to worry about going back to grab it after all.  Another month or so, and I won't need to worry about lights at all.  That makes me happy.  Of course, then it'll get hot and I'll start complaining about the 90° heat St. Louis is famous for.  And bugs.  And ticks.  Yeah, if we could just wipe June, July, August, December, and January off the calendar around here, that would be good.  Maybe not June.  June is usually nice, but last year it was bad.  December isn't all bad either most of the time.  The days are just too short.

It's funny, when I sat down to write, my intent was to do a "how I got here" post.  I'll have to work on that for next time.