I love days like this.
Blue skies and warm sunlight follow me to Waimanalo, and a gentle sea breeze blows me up to the trailhead. Root, Scat, and Ckucke are already there, prepping their bikes for the ride. My Moment hasn’t been ridden for months, so the tires have gone soft and weird lint balls and dust have accumulated on it. I pump up the tires with the Silca Super Pista and run some Boeshield on the chain. Root’s chain is dry and squeaky like a robot out of a Miyazaki film, so he squirrels some of my lube.
Up Government Road we go. The windstorms from a couple of weeks ago have littered the surface with broken branches, leaves and a few larger tree trunks. My separated shoulder seems fine with the riding position on the climb up, but my sore snowboarding back-leg knee twinges on each hard pedal stroke. Some of the overhanging growth on the side loop hangs lower than usual, forcing dismounts. Some misguided soul has carved an off-camber set of switchbacks stitching the technical downhill and tossed debris into the groove to prevent its use. The new cut is soft and a little too tight at the turns to navigate without nearly coming to a stop. Further down in the swamp gum trees, a turnoff has been started into the ‘uluhe, but it seems to go nowhere. When you stop and look around, there is a faint line returning to the main trail. Perhaps this is not done yet… Along the lower contour, the root-over has been partially cut away, but not in the riding line. If you hit the notch, you end up going into the wall. At the tight brassaia grove, a rock face has been cleared away beside the narrow root-over. All these trail mods make me think that someone is trying to make the trail rideable in the opposite direction.
Back up onto the road, we fly down the Ditch, dodging the deadfall and the occasional muddy area. Near the turnaround, we pass a fellow with a guitar strolling down the trail towards us. We greet each other and go our separate ways. We pause to ride the big log on the upper trail, but bypass the cardiac climb – nobody is in nay mood to do that. At the now washed-out wooden plank, we encounter the wandering minstrel again! He’s sitting in the shade favoring us with a song. We continue down to the main trail, then Ckucke and I climb up a secret side trail we had seen earlier. The evil push-up connects to an old doubletrack rising up the ridgeline. It passes through melaleuca, then into cane grass. It seems that outlaw motocrossers have been through here by the tire marks. I see two overgrown doubletrack lefts on the way up, but the worn line is a groove off the grassy ridge. We follow the moto rut down to the big log on the old log turnoff on the main Ditch trail. After a moment, Root and Scat meet up with us. It takes a bit of convincing, but we manage to get them to follow us backtracking up the trail for a go in the “correct” direction. It seems fairly evil in either direction in its current level of upkeep.
Back on the main trail, we head back out. At one of the stream crossings, we yet again pass the minstrel. This time, he’s sitting on a big boulder being meditative and indulging in some mind-altering greenery. Near the chicane at the inner loop entrance, we pass some friendly hikers. Scat for some reason notices that one of them was bubblegum scented. My mind is elsewhere on the climb, so I don’t detect her scent. At the road, we run into a dude with an old woodland camo coat. He stuffs something inside and holds it shut. I have no idea what it is, nor do I especially care. I greet him, but he says nothing and just glares. Scat says he had seen the guy earlier on the trail, but I guess the camouflage worked, since I didn’t even notice him on the way out! The dude apparently is more cordial to Scat and Root who pass him later – he was probably startled when Ckucke and I passed him. We return down Government road to the cars and make an early sortie.
Pictures here
D = 11.35 km (7.05-miles), Vavr = 10.3 km/h (6.4 mph), Vmax = 33.6 km/h (20.9 mph), T = 1-hour, 6-minutes (actual trail time about 2.5-hours)
Note: this all took place before the Koko Head stabbings – I would be much more wary of what camouflage guy was hiding had this happened after.
0 Responses to “Days Like This”