A full moon on Saturday night meant it was time for an evening ride. I met Chris and Root out at Wailuna in the late afternoon. Ckucke, Jeff, and Sara were off-island, and Scat was otherwise occupied. A small group and a fast pace would be advantageous, since I discovered at the last minute that my Niterider battery had an issue. I had plugged it in the day before after Chris called me with the ride plans, but it was still flat. The multimeter said the charger was turning out the correct voltage, but the battery was only outputting around 6 volts. The battery was quite old, so one or more cells had probably gone bad. As we rolled out, the sun was still high in the sky, but the temperature was bearable. A strong wind was blowing downhill. The road climb from the park was quick, and the trail climb went smoothly. Either our pace was a bit higher than normal so I didn’t have time to fully recover, or I wasn’t quite on it. Many of the climbs took the wind out of me and sent the legs into burn.
It was still bright when we reached the top of the loop. At the start of the descent, I breathed in a little bug or grass seed. The requisite coughing and dry-heaves ensued until whatever it was came out. The entire singletrack descent was in daylight. The sun was dropping behind the Waianae range just as we hit the top of the dirt road. The upper jump run and berm line passed in the dwindling twilight. The usable light was pretty much gone as we hit the lower berms and crossed the road into the gully run. My little LED Cateye light did almost nothing to guide my way through the dark trail. Memory and instinctive reactions kept me upright. My eyes could manage making out objects like roots and jumps if the speed was low enough, and I wasn’t in the range of someone else’s light. Neither of these conditions were often realized. A hint of a glow remained in the Western sky as we hit the asphalt and descended the road out of Royal Summit and climbed back up Komomai to the cars.
As the days shorten as summer winds up, it would be difficult to complete the loop in light without moving up the start time. The full moon did little to aid us since the cloud cover was fairly heavy, and the moon didn’t rise to an effective height until after we had refueled at Taco Hell.
D = 13.36 km (8.30-miles), Vavr = 10.0 km/h (6.2 mph), Vmax = 54.1 km/h (33.6 mph), T = 1-hour, 7-minutes (actual trail time approximately 2-hours)
More pictures here
That was fun. Just enough. And the bike worked very well!