Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Work party at Greylock. We lost the landing field that we used to use at Mt. Greylock because somebody bought the farm. I don't mean that somebody died, nothing like that, I mean that somebody literally purchased the farm where we used to land, and the new owners didn't want people landing on their property. So after a bunch of negotiations, a group of pilots came to an agreement with the state rangers about a new place to land, on publicly owned property. There was a minor problem, though, in that pilots are really fussy and want to land in a field, and that's not what this new piece of property was. At best, it was rough semi-open with some denser patches. But the officials were okay with the idea of our installing a piece of open land. So we showed up with one. Open land is funny, because when it's packed up for transit, it doesn't look anything like you might expect, it looks like a bunch of chainsaws and work gloves and loppers and a tractor with a brush-hog trailer and an excavator and a chipper. There was a two-day work party scheduled (moved from last weekend because of inclement weather), and over 50 people showed up, so we made rapid progress and were pretty much done by late afternoon. My role was mostly dragging felled trees out to the dirt road, with a little bit of trimming with a bow saw when they were too big to move in one piece. And a little bit of dragging them over to the chipper to shove them in, but it quickly became clear that we had way more people than we needed doing that job.

To be honest, "multisport adventure" is kind of a euphemism for "this really didn't turn out the way I intended".

I had my mountain bike in the car with the idea of stopping in Lancaster on the way home from work for a little mellow ride. Everything started out fine, just tooling along, nothing too strenuous. I've run here a few times, but I was enjoying it more on the bike. Some of the trails look like they've gotten very little use lately, as they were getting a bit overgrown, and there were a number of spots with fallen trees that I had to dismount for. I was able to go farther than I had been on foot, and I was up in unexplored territory when the chain fell off. Or so I initially thought. Closer inspection revealed that the rear derailleur had snapped off, rendering the bike completely unrideable. 5.75 km from my car, no phone, and it's not like I could think of anybody to call anyway.

Well, no point in panicking. Going back the way I came seemed like it would be a pretty dreary trip dragging the bike, so I headed for the highway. Fortunately, I was just barely north enough to be able to go though a back yard to a residential street. Once on pavement, I was able to go a little faster by using the bike like a scooter, standing on one pedal and pushing with the other foot. Once I got across I-190, I ditched the bike behind a stone wall and set off walking. No map, no phone, so I had to wing it, mostly just following my shadow in order to keep moving eastward.

I went down what looked like a future residential area, crossed a field, and got to another residential street. When that turned the wrong direction, I headed down a dirt road into what looked like a random dump, that turned out to be sketchy cattle farm. The farmer was there, friendly guy maybe in his 30s, and I asked for directions to Rte. 70. He pointed me in the direction I was heading and said it would lead to Mass Youth Soccer -- perfect. The road took me along the edge of a gravel mining operation, and had I been able to go on the internal roads though there, I would have been about halfway back at that point. But I didn't know that, and it turned out I was probably already trespassing in a hardhat area.

But the road swung north to get to MAYSA. When I got to the first field, I tried to see if there were any trails leading out of the back, but there was too much water in the way. Once I got to the fields that fronted Rte. 70, I thought I was home free, but I was actually fenced in. Had there been nobody around, I would have climbed the fence, bt it seemed inappropriate in the circumstances. I couldn't find any way out (turns out the cars come in from the north most of the time), but I finally found a way through some thorny fight behind a detention pond and got out to the road. And then it was just an easy walk back. I didn't do any running during any of this, in part because it was hot and in part because running in mountain bike shoes and bike shorts didn't seem particularly entertaining.

When Kimball's opened a new ice cream stand on Rte 70 several years ago, it seemed like a really weird location. But now that I understand just how many soccer fields there are in the neighborhood, most of which are not visible from the road, it's clearly a brilliant move.

I ended up with several large scratches on my legs, and once I got back to the car, I started removing crawling ticks, I think eight in all. These were some of the biggest ticks I've ever seen, which makes them quite a bit less scary. But still not the size of a small frog.

It was a pretty good AOWN outing as well. On the bike, I passed within a couple of meters of a beaver who was relaxing in the bushes, and he took off at a gallop for the water, startling me. I saw quite a few birds, most of which I couldn't identify, but I definitely recognized the turkey as it passed overhead. And on the road between the gravel pit and the MAYSA fields, I came around a curve and say a coyote in the road about 20 m away, who quickly skedaddled into the woods.

C • TFBIP 1

Was intending to go for a mountain bike ride on the Mason rail trail, figuring that wouldn't aggravate my lingering maladies very much, but when I pulled the bike out of the car, not having used it since last fall, the rear wheel wouldn't turn, disk brake was stuck in the on position. Couldn't stop to figure out how to fix it, because the blackflies were insaaaane. So I headed home, callled my brother for advice, and got it working tolerably again.