Cross in the Spring

The sun was out and it felt like short pants day for bike riding. So instead of riding around the south end of Lake Washington I decided to ride my cross bike on the Seattle City Light Powerline right of way. I hadn't been here since last fall when I tried out my 1-speed, home made cross bike.

It was every bit as hard as I remembered.

There's a couple miles of streets to Cheasty Blvd where you can ride a gravelled path all the way up the hill instead of riding the street. It's in great shape with only a couple of street crossings and a handful of weeps so the trail isn't very wet.

Once you get to the top of Beacon Hill there's a 4 or 5 block ride to get on the grass and away you go. There's always a break by using the Chief Sealth Trail. You can see from some of the pictures that it's a continuous set of swales following the power line. So I could pick a line and make it as hard or easy as I wanted.

And the surface was SOOOO hard to ride on. It's this incredibly lumpy grass, like an old pasture, covered with grass. In many places it was mowed to about 4-5 inches in height. Where it wasn't mowed the grass was about 2 feet tall; I avoided those sections.

There were boggy places and hidden holes and ditches at the base of the swales.

I bounced and pedaled and tried to keep my front wheel down on the really steep hills and tried to avoid the boggiest places. My tongue was hanging out and I was working very hard. From time to time there was a street crossing just for interest.

And it was fun! And it was a workout.

Combined with my first lake swim of the season this morning it was a glorious NW spring day.