Tax Day

With three day of summer weather, finally, I'd been looking forward to taking this road bike out. A donation to Brooktondale Bikes, it took me a while to figure out what to do with it. A wide cyclocross bar, 32c tires, and a wide ratio freewheel gave it some wandering potential. As a congratulations for doing taxes all by myself this year, I told myself I could go for a ride as soon as I finished.
We're having a baby, which I'm really happy about. My wife not so much, she's suffered through weeks and weeks of nausea. So our taxes were my deal this year. We sold the fixer upper that we bought in 2002, and the one here locally. The one that now makes me take a glowing reference to "stick built" with a grain of salt. Try "dirt sill". And then we bought our current house, which I call "the last fixer upper".
So taxes were a bit more than last year. But at 4:00 pm, April 15th, I rolled down to the Post Office and dropped everything off. And headed towards County Road 250, which leads to the base of Mount Shavano.
Old schoolhouse, a project of the Colorado Historical Society.

. . stop and feed the horse along the road. A welcome break from the very sturdy west wind.

That saw blade seems to be connected to the drive shaft. Conversion kit?

Finally, the dirt.

I like these shots.

Breathing a little heavy, passing one of many side roads.

And here's a snow bank. Followed by another. Sun's setting, time to turn around.

The sturdy west wind provides. A short section of highway to County Road 160, I note how slowly I'm getting passed. Not just courtesy, but relative speed as well. Nice when the winds don't shift on the way home.

A last little bit of dirt, in a small low valley along the Arkansas. Dust picking up, making the sky a bit hazy.

Sand & Sandstone Study

A collection of pictures from the last few years. Documenting the weather, the terrain, and notable features of nearby locales. First we start with Andrew, during a lunch break from mountain biking, near Gemini Bridges in Moab, Utah:

A rest day from the bikes that week had us hiking through Arches National Park. Perfect day. This picture is looking across a canyon, looking into a bowl carved out into the side of a cliff, from a trail heading up to the Delicate Arch:


. . and the Delicate Arch:


A year or so later, another trip to Moab found different weather. Snow. Cold snow. Just two days into the trip, we headed south to Flagstaff, Arizona. To where the weather followed us every step of the way. Much like a four-cylinder Winnebago finds chance to draft a rolling Taco Stand:



We woke up with the vehicles covered in snow, in late March, in Flagstaff. And went down, down, 2500 feet or so, to nearby Sedona. And found perfect temperatures and trail conditions.

We survived, and thrived, and took the spaced-out town dwellers in stride. Before the long drive back to Salida. (Overheard at an excellent Sedona Chinese restaraunt: "yeah my avedic, umm, arved-ah-ahryervedic (ayurvedic?) teacher asked: no, what do you usually eat? I said cheeseburgers and fries mostly").


Then my parents came to visit last fall. They took a few hikes in the hills way up behind our house. Here's one of my dad. They're from central New York, and the weather insisted on making them feel at home.


A few months later, in those same foothills, more sunshine, and a little bit of snow.


This is the kind of footprint a 125 pound dog leaves all around the house:


We've got our springtime winds blowing through, with blue skies, and melting snow. The prevailing winds from the west mean I'm in a low gear while heading downhill - and more often than not big-ringing it while loaded with groceries, heading back up the hill. Go figure. I'll take it.

The new cargo bike: Big Dummy arrives

Yes, I got a new bike (I am giving an old one away though). This new ride is the Surly Big Dummy, which accepts the cargo accessories designed by Xtracycle. I just barely managed to get one, but get one I did. I bought it as a frame and fork, having had plenty of time to figure out what components to install. They were first seen at the 2006 Interbike tradeshow in the fall, then at the 2007 Interbike, and finally became available at the end of February 2008. Surly did quite a bit of research and development, along with ironing out complications with painting and shipping a really non-traditionally sized frame.

I built the wheelset, with a Shimano generator (dynamo) hub in the front, 32 spokes, straight gauge, 3-cross, laced to a SunRingle Equalizer rim (31mm wide).
Rear wheel is a Shimano LX hub, 36 spokes; also straight gauge 3-cross lacing. Both hubs accept disc brakes, I went with a slightly oversized rotor up front, with my favorite cable-pull (mechanical) disc brake, the Avid BB-7's.

On the first trip, I rode out all the way to the veterinarian, to pick up some old dog medicine. Riding back to town, I spotted a big chunk of firewood, rode past it twenty feet, circled back, and thought - here we go! No excuse with this thing not to pick something up. The bike has a whopping 200lb payload -plus rider! A BOB trailer is rated somewhere around 70lbs. What this means is that "smaller" loads are easy to handle with the Big Dummy. (Which is a Sanford and Sons reference). A purpose-built, one piece frame is going to be torsionally stiffer than anything else.

For instance I was riding home one night in the dark with a loaded BOB trailer. They have an attachment point on either the specially designed skewer or axle nuts. It's very simple, secure, and easy to use. Riding gently out of the saddle, the load was causing enough leverage on the rear frame dropouts to cause the tire-driven generator to pulse, as it pulled away from, then pushed against the sidewall. No wheel axle slip, just flex. Most of it probably in the spokes, but even that bike has a sturdy wheel build. And that time with the chicken wire, well, I knew what to expect at that point.

The bashguard is handmade out of aluminum stock, made by a friend of a friend's back in Ithaca. Note the heart, diamond cutouts. This was the first piece for the bike, which then led the search for a crankset with a 58x94mm bolt pattern. Which I found on a compact Shimano crank spider, which I then mounted onto a set of square taper XT crankarms. From Team Velveeta, a 14x32 7spd cassette, still brand new in the box. I fitted a spacer onto the 9spd cassette freehub body, which helps the chain clear the tire in the lowest gear. And a set of almost new Deore thumshifters, mounted to a Jeff Jones licensed Titec H-bar.

It rides amazingly well, expecially when previous bikes used for commuting are a 47 lb single speed Rollfast cruiser, or a typically overloaded-trailer-towing 3spd GT bicycle.

. . . and it made the Minneapolis news, where the Surly folks are based. Here's the link.

Mt. Shavano

What a great winter this year! (I never thought I'd hear myself say that!) Epic storms, playing in the snow with my friends, and learning to tele-ski have all but made me forget that I miss my bikes, summer and singletrack.

It didn't look like it was going to be this way. We had a nice extended mild Autumn that was making the skiers and boarders a bit nervous. Monarch scarcely had six inches of snow the week before they opened; it wasn't looking good. But early morning of opening day, the mountain got walloped with six feet, and all was peachy and powdery.

But to get back on track here, we hiked Mt. Shavano on November 4th, and only encountered a 100 foot patch of snow across the trail. And we were able to start far later than the thunderstorms of summer would allow, so we were treated to an incredible sunset at 14,000 feet. So, let the picture show commence! (Click on the panorama shots to get the big view.)

You can see the summit of Mt. Shavano from the house (it's the highest peak in the photo.)

We were mobbed by a pair of extra-friendly jays. The must make a good living off of gorp.

First view of the valley above treeline; Methodist Mountain is in the center, and you can peek into the San Louis valley just to the right.

The air is getting thinner...

The only snow to cross was that little patch below the saddle.

The saddle. Scree fields above timberline always feel like being on another planet.

Our planet has a really nice star.

All smiles above Salida.

Aww, how cute.

Rocks make lousy tripods. On a lot of my 14er hikes summit time is short and anxious thanks to some approaching thunderhead. The nice weather let us relax and take it all in. The perspective is fantastic. You can actually see the curvature of the Earth, and you get the sense that our atmosphere is a thin and delicate thing indeed. The sky overhead is a deeper shade of blue and space doesn't feel so far away after all. If you lay on your back you can imagine falling down forever into the darkening blue until all you can see are stars.

Mountains? Yeah, we got those. The northern view from the summit. There about a thousand named peaks in this picture, but the closest are Tabeguache, Antero, Princeton, White and Jones. Also visible are the Elk Mountains, the Sawatch Range, The Mosquitoes, Tenmile Range, the Kenosha Moutains, and the Tarryall Range.

You can see the house from the summit of Mt. Shavano. (It's the white spec next to Ute Creek;-) This is the view to the southeast. Pikes Peak is visible above the Arkansas Hills, and you can see the Wet Mountains, the Sangre De Cristo Range, Sand Dunes N.P. and the San Louis Valley, the Cochetopa Hills, Mt. Ouray and Antora.

We chased dusk with our headlamps as it swept over the valley and bade the Sangres goodnight with a rosy glow.

Close call, next project

We've picked up a small flock of chickens since we've moved in. Some abandoned, some just passed on from a friend. My dad helped me set up an existing pen on the property to house them better. Heat lamp, plug-in water bowl for winter, roosts and so on. It was getting time to clean it out, so I tossed a bunch of stale bread in their yard to get them out of the coop. As I was scooping away, in flew one of the chickens. Which is unusual, usually they stay away from any commotion I'm making. She was trying to get away from the gray mass diving down on her. In that half-second I realized it was a hawk, the bird wheeled around in the doorway and dove after the rest of the flock. Which was running for cover under the larger, three-sided stall. They like to hang out here when it's inclement weather, they don't like scratching in the snow, and probably feel more secure under its roof. I saw the hawk dive and get both sets of talons on one of the white hens, right on the stall's threshold. It let go immediately and flew into the far corner of the stall, towards the only set of windows. It stopped right on the window sill. I walked right up to it, gratefully wearing a set of insulated work gloves, and grabbed it right by the legs and tail feathers. Easier to truss than any of our chickens. Hanging upside down, turning its head to keep an eye on things, I carried it out of the stall. My heart started to race, in wonder at what had just happened and what I was carrying in my hand. I walked back to the house, and knocked on Andrew's apartment window. His head popped up, I held the bird in one hand and pointed with the other. He cranked open the window, and I said something to the effect of: Hey I just caught this going after the chickens while I was in there cleaning the coop can you grab your camera I'll meet you at your front porch".


During this whole time, I had the hawk just by one leg and the base of its tail. The only struggle it gave was to occasionally flap its wings once or twice, and fold them in again. I tried putting my hand on its shoulder, to support the rest of its body, and it never even tried to bite. Just kept its beak slightly open. It didn't grab on with its talons either. Which I suppose is correct in this situation; you're not trying to hold on, you're waiting to get away. Still, what amazed me was how calm and steady it was during its capture. The opposite of trying to catch a sparrow that's flown into our house, for sure. I let it go soon after the last picture; it took off low to the ground, flew expertly between two low-hanging branches, and that was it. Didn't even lose a tail feather. Andrew went to go upload pictures, I went back to the chickens to see how they had fared.

Not a scratch. Most had followed the rooster back into the coop, silent and huddled in the corner. A few were still in the stall, pressed into corners. This is definitely one of the vulnerable aspects of chickens, they will suffocate each other trying to wedge into a small space when under duress. I had to gently move them out and into the coop. They were all fine, not a scratch or a drop of blood. A few more loose feathers than usual, and that was it.

I sent the pictures to my brother, who had this to say: "The goshawk is in the accipiter family, like the cooper/sharp shinned hawks. They're differentiated from the buteos (like the red tailed hawk) as being a more swooping through the woods and flying actively; as opposed to the more soaring high in the sky buteos. Accipiters are known as bird feeder hawks, so your chicken coop is right in that ballpark." He sent me this link. He said he heard these birds of prey can bite through steel-reinforced gloves - but hey, glad it worked for you.

I've alway kept the chickens closed up in the coop at night, and when we're not home. The yard has a 4' fence, but no cover. Clearly some will be necessary. Amber having driven to work, I was left with a balmy day and a bike trailer, to start my next project.