Review: SteriPEN Classic Handheld UV Water Purifier

My friend Mark has a drinking problem. His problem is that he often forgets to drink enough on our various back country adventures. Today, on our latest trip to Rattlesnake Mountain, this wasn't a problem because I appealed to Mark's love of gadgets. "You can use my new SteriPEN and I'll take pictures and write about it for the blog," I told him. As you can see in the photos below, Mark joyfully accepted this assignment.



The SteriPEN is not a filter, it's a device that purifies water by using ultra-violet light to disrupt the DNA in the various microbes that might be lurking in the water. If the water is cloudy, you'd want to use a pre-filter to get the large gunk out (I plan on using coffee filters for this), but in the case of a clear running stream like this one, the SteriPEN and a bottle is all you need.

The SteriPEN Classic weighs about six ounces and is about the same size as an electric toothbrush. I'd contemplated getting the smaller, lighter SteriPEN Adventurer but it uses CR123A batteries. I decided that the Classic was more practical for me since it uses 4 standard-sized AA cells.



The really great thing about the SteriPEN is that it is fast and simple to use. You take off the protective cap, press the button twice for a 0.5 liter bottle or once for a 1.0 liter bottle, wait for the green light to flash and then push the bulb into the bottle. The nose of the SteriPEN wedges into a small mouth bottle or you can use it as a stirrer in a wide mouth bottle. You swirl the water around while the light zaps the nasty critters that may lurk in the water. The entire process takes 48 seconds for a half-liter or 90 seconds for a full liter.




Unlike chemical purifiers, there is no long wait and the taste of the water is unchanged. At a minute and half per liter of water, the SteriPEN is faster than any filter I've used. Again, if the water is murky I will use a pre-filter, but the SteriPEN is quite handy. And being able to drink that cool, mountain stream water within a couple of minutes of coming to the creek is a priceless joy.


To really do things right, you should carry some kind of pre-filter and be careful to keep your lips off the "unclean" outer portion of the bottle. And in case of battery or other electronic failure, I carry a small stash of Chlorine Dioxide MicroPur Tablets.

My bike headlight, my camera and now my SteriPEN all use AA batteries. I've been using Rechargeable Hybrid NiMH Batteries for the past few years. There are various brands and things are moving fast, but cells of this type will be labled "precharged" or "ready to use." The important thing is that these cells have a low self-discharge rate and I look for the ones that have the highest capacity as measured in mAh.

My devices don't need to have their batteries charged every day but I since I may be away from power outlets for days at a time, I've added a couple of
UltraLast Green Solar 2 AA Chargers to my stash of gadgets.


These small chargers sit in my kitchen window at home, soaking up the sun and charging the batteries that I then swap into whatever device happens to be running low. On my back country trips, I pack the chargers in clear Dry Pak cases that I strap to my pack. Even though it may take a couple of days to charge 4 AA cells, rotating batteries through the various devices and the chargers lets me I keep my gadgets running without the need for wall current.

Returning to the SteriPEN, both Mark and I have been favorably impressed with the ease and speed of the device. Mark pointed out that the protective cap for the SteriPEN's bulb could be easily lost, so I'll be making a small leash to keep the cap attached to the SteriPEN and its neoprene case.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson

One More Kid On A Bike

Saturday, a woman and a boy of about seven years old came into Bike Works. Our shop sells used bikes and the young fellow was looking for a bike. "Preferably something with multiple gears and hand brakes," the woman said. Our supply of refurbished kids bikes is unfortunately a bit low at this time but I did have one simple, used, blue BMX bike with a coaster brake that I showed to the woman and the boy. I explained stopping with a coaster brake to the boy and he nodded.

"He's just in town visiting for a few days and he wants to go riding," she explained. "His bike at home has hand brakes and multiple gears. You don't rent bikes, do you?"

"Sorry," I explained, "We don't and I don't know anyone in town who rents kid's bikes."

"That's what I've found as well," she said, glancing at the $25 price tag on the bike.

"We don't rent bikes," I said, "but he's only in town for a couple of days. I'll loan you this bike." I adjusted the seat to the right height for the kid and loaned him one of our helmets so he could test ride it. He understood the coaster brake right away and came back with a big grin on his face.

"We'll bring the bike back on Tuesday," the woman said.

"Perfect," I said.

"I need to buy him a helmet," said the woman. I helped the boy try on helmets and he picked out a blue one. He also found a light that he liked and the woman said she'd buy it for him. As I was ringing up the sale the woman said, "We'll bring the bike back on Tuesday, but I'd like to make a donation as well." (Bike Works is a non-profit and our main mission is getting kids on bikes and teaching them how to fix them up). "Add another forty dollars to our total."

Past The Gate

The gate is less than an hour's ride from my house. Not far past the gate, the pavement ends. The road goes up. A bit further on a creek has washed away a chunk of the road and the way across involves balancing on the rocks, using the bike as a crutch. I scramble up the other side.

My friend Mark, who has been with me here many times but not today, has told me things his GPS and computer have told him. The average grade from here to the ridge top is 7 percent but there are tenth-mile sections of 15 to 17 percent and some that are much worse. I have a map with dense contour lines and a compass and legs and lungs and bicycle that tell me these same things in other, non-numeric ways.

My map and compass comfort me and affirm the instinct that tells me to take the rougher road, the one that heads higher.


The roads are here because the towers are here and the towers are here because this is a mountain and these days we mark our mountains with towers to cast our words and pictures and bits and tweets and American Idols widely into the world.



I crawl up these roads, roads where I only ever see white service trucks go. And I bring my own bits, stamping photons into electrons, images into memories, pictures from the wide, high places squeezed into silicon circuits, bits acquired trudgingly to be blasted back at light speed, through wifi and 3G and gee-whiz, bounced back up off towers and blogged and tweeted and interneted in a web that never quite captures...

What it's like to pitch a tarp just as the light is fading, just as the rain is starting.


The rain falls and the wind tugs at the tarp but these are the things I have come here to test. The goal is not to recreate every warm comfort of the civilized world, 3,000 feet below. I'm here to learn if I've brought just enough comfort, if I'm comfortable with enough.

The rain doesn't last as long as the night. In the morning I leave the bike and hike higher. There is snow in the high country.


A lake shines in the distance. I won't hike there today. I've come far enough, for now.


I return to camp, pack up and roll back to Issaquah. It's not quite right to say I'm rolling home, it is more accurate to say I'm rolling through home.

There is more home to explore and I will keep rolling.

Tour Divide: Frequently Asked Questions

While I have a small (but growing!) group of folks who have read every damn word I've blasted onto this blog over the past 5+ years, many of my readers are people who stumble here via Google or some other search engine. I think Walter said it best in The Big Lebowski:

"So you have no frame of reference, Donny. You're like a child who wanders in in the middle of a movie and wants to know..."

Lacking the frame of reference, questions arise. Often, the same questions, over and over. Many of those questions have to do with my racing the Tour Divide this year, so I decided to create this little list of questions and answers. It should prove handy to at least a few of you.

Q: What is the Tour Divide?

A: A one stage, 2745 mile self-supported mountain bike race from Banff, Alberta to the northern border of Mexico along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. Details at: http://tourdivide.org/

Q: Who are you?

A: I'm probably not the best person to answer that. Back when I launched this blog, I wrote an introduction here. Much of it still holds true.

Q: Why are you racing the Tour Divide?

A: The best answer to that is here.

Q: Didn't you do this before?

A: Sort of. In 2005, I was the first person to complete the Great Divide Mountain Bike Race on a single-speed bike. I wrote the story of that trip in a Dirt Rag article and an online book called The Way of the Mountain Turtle.

Q: What bike are you riding?

A: A Redline Monocog Flight, courtesy of the wonderful folks at SBS. Details here and here.

Q: Why a single-speed?

A: I don't have good enough balance to do the Tour Divide on a unicycle! Seriously, I prefer single-speeds.

Q: What gear ratio are you running?

A: Probably a 32*18. I ran 32*17 on my 26"-wheeled Monocog in '05 and Chris Plesko ran 32*17 on his record setting Tour Divide Race last year (he rode a 29er). I rode the first 6 months with a 32*17 on my Flight, but I recently knocked the gearing down to 32*18 and my overall speed actually went up! The slightly lower gearing lets me spin a bit more.

Q: How are you going to carry stuff?

A: My main luggage is a home-brew coroplast trunk and a small stuff bag up front. Details here. Aside from making stronger stays for the trunk and getting a slightly bigger wedge bag in the frame, the kit is pretty well dialed in. The contents of the front stuff bag are detailed here. I also talk some about gear in an earlier post here.

Q: How do you train for something like the Tour Divide?

A: I don't train, I practice. Details here. A couple of ride reports from practice runs are here and here.

Q: What kind of food do you eat on long rides?

A: As I have said repeatedly, I am not a nutritional role model. That said, I queried a bunch of other long-distance cyclists and the result is this article.

Q: What about water?

A: Various Divide racers use filters, tablets, etc. My current plan is outlined here.

Q: How can you afford to race the Tour Divide?

A: I get by with a lot of help from my friends.

Q: My question isn't on your list.

A: That's not a question! But if you have a question that you don't see answered here, first use the search function on the blog, I may have covered your question in the past (I've written thousands of words about lights, for example). If you come up empty, it may be something I'm still figuring out or I may just not have gotten around to writing about it. If so, email me (kentsbike [at] gmail [dot] com). I can't promise I'll respond (it's amazing how damn much email I get!) but I'll try. A lot of blog posts come as a result of questions. If something is part of my secret, race-strategy I may keep mum or be cagey in my answer, but I try to be a pretty open guy.

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OK, that's it for now. Stay tuned to the blog for more updates and keep 'em rolling,

Kent

The Weight (and Wait) of Water

A few years ago, in The Way of the Mountain Turtle, I wrote:

"It is easy and wrong to think that minimal gear and a simple quest equates to some kind of renunciation of the material world. In a very real sense, a Divide racer’s minimalism is in fact an extremely purified form of materialism. I’m not free of material goods, I’m intensely dependent on them. Each item I have chosen for this journey has been extensively studied and obsessively considered. I’ve literally weighed my options and made my choices. The other racers have done the same."

Now, in 2010, I am again committed to racing the Divide. I'm a bit older and the course is a bit longer but the principles remain the same. And in these months before the race, I am weighing my options and thinking about my gear.

I'm thinking a lot about water, for water is not something you take for granted on the Divide. If you are counting on water coming from taps then you are counting wrong, especially when the race goes into the high country and the dry lands of the Great Divide Basin, Southern Colorado and the enchanted lands of New Mexico. Those are the places where you learn that water is precious. You tune your ears to the musical notes of any drip or ripple. Your dry nose learns to long for subtle hints of humidity.

The best water I have ever tasted came from these New Mexican cattle stock tanks.


In 2005 I rode with bottles, seven liters for the highest, driest, longest sections and I was sucking on fumes when I came upon these tanks. Filtered through a bandana and purified with tablets, this water got me down the trail to the next oasis and drop by precious drop I made my way southward.

A liter of water weighs about two pounds. Yes, I mix metric and English units, I'm an American, it's what we do. When I was younger I thought that by 2010 this country would be fully metric but it turned out I was wrong about that. I was also wrong about going everywhere by jetpack. It turns out that in 2010, I'm still riding around on a bicycle, albeit one that has fewer gears than the bikes I rode in my teen years. But I digress...

Where was I? Oh yes, obsessing about water. It weighs about two pounds per liter. If I didn't care about weight I could ride from tap to tap, towing a water tank trailer. But the weight of the water would slow me down. More time in the hot sun would mean I'd need to carry more water.

On the other hand, if I was infinitely fast, I could travel with no bottles at all, drinking like a camel at each stop and then sprinting to the next.

But I am neither a cargo mule nor a camel. I have to find the middle way.

Last time I had four bottles at the start, adding bottles as things got drier. I'd estimate and bet. Study the maps, study the sky and decide how many bottles would be filled for each leg of the journey. As things got drier, I got more cautious. In the high desert, I left each water source with both my bottles and my stomach full of water.

Questionable water sources mean precautions must be taken. In 2005, I chose water purification tablets over carrying a filter. I'd filter the large bits of crud from the water with a bandana and let the Micropur Water Purifier Tablets take care of whatever evil nasties might be lurking in the water. The tablets take a few hours to work so I evolved a strategy of rotating my bottles, drinking from the one with water that had been purifying for a few hours. Dropping a tablet in a bottle and rolling on is faster than waiting for a slow filter to drip-process the water. I had to think not only about the weight of water, but the wait for the water.

In 2005, I relied entirely on bottles, not wanting the weight of water on my back. I've rethought this and now I'm riding with a 100 ounce water bladder in an Osprey Daylite Pack. In March, I'll be getting some Ergon Team stuff including a BD2 pack that will most likely replace the Osprey in my kit. The BD2 should transfer most of the weight from my shoulders to my hips. The Ergon folks have done wonderful things with the ergonomics of grips, so I have high hopes for the pack.

Another addition to the kit will be a SteriPEN Adventurer Handheld Water Purifier.


This little device promises to act quicker (90 seconds!) than the tablets (which I'll still carry). I'll also probably work a water bladder into my Monocog's tailbox.

It's been raining pretty much every day for the past few weeks here in the Pacific Northwest, but maybe that makes this the best time for me to be thinking obsessively about water for all the dry miles on the trail.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Flammable Fritos

A few days ago Russ Roca mentioned in an online forum that he'd really grown fond of Fritos. In response, someone commented that they are not only tasty, they make great emergency kindling. This in turn prompted me to draft my son Eric into shooting this video of me verifying that Fritos are, in fact, rather flammable. The easy way would be to just use some matches, but that's not how I roll. So here in all it's unedited glory is me starting a fire with my Swiss Army Knife, some Fritos, a scrap of paper and a Magnesium Fire Starter. The witty banter reveals the great respect my son has for my efforts.

Chrome Shoes: A Better Bike Sneaker

While I'm not up there in the Bike Blog Celebrity Blogosphere with the really talented and hardworking folks like Fat Cyclist, Bike Snob NYC and Jill Homer, I am what is known as "a minor niche celebrity." I found this out when the Hershey folks used that term when they turned me down for sponsorship. I really thought Hersheys would be an ideal sponsor of my Tour Divide Race, but the Hershey people disagreed. Oh well, even though major chocolate company can't see the value in sending a fifty year old guy enough free chocolate to fuel him on a 2745 mile race, other folks do somehow manage to stumble their way to my blog and say "Hey, this guy is talking to the people we want to reach, we should send him stuff!" This is what happens when you are "a minor niche celebrity" and it's one of the cooler perks of having a semi-popular blog.

So the folks at Chrome, who are mostly famous for making tough, cool messenger bags and packs, email me out of the blue and asked if I'd like to have a pair of their shoes to try out. I said sure, went to their website and picked out a pair Kursks.

Guess what? These are nice shoes. And I'm not just saying that 'cause I got 'em for free. The Kursk is a tough, well-made sneaker. I picked this shoe because it's Codura nylon instead of cotton, so it's better in the rain. The shoe has a couple of nice bikey touches like a little loop that keeps the laces out of your bike chain, a reflective patch on the heel, and a good grippy sole for folks like me that prefer flat pedals. Most importantly, the shoe has a good stiff sole. I work as a bike mechanic so I wind up test riding lots of bikes with all kinds of pedals including a lot of bikes with various clipless pedals. When you're riding a clipless pedal without a clipless shoe, you really appreciate a shoe with a stiff, grippy sole.

The only real problem I had with the Kursks is that they are a bit narrow and way too hip for me. I'm basically a cargo pants and Keens guy but whenever I'd wear the Chrome Kursks I'd have this overwhelming desire to put on skinny jeans, grow a wispy goatee and move to Portland. My youngish friends, including the kids at Bike Works, all proclaimed the shoes to be "sweet." My wife, however, declared that the Kursks look like "bowling shoes gone bad." And I have to confess that the shoes just never felt right for me. So I passed them on to my cool colleague Muuqi and I'm back riding in Keens.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Coco Love Alcorn likes bikes and intellectual boys

Coco Love Alcorn is a witty singer-songwriter who managed to insert two songs into my mental bike-commute soundtrack. Her album, Joyful, has been out since last April but I'm slow on the uptake and only discovered her this morning. Coco's song I Got A Bicycle is a quiet anthem of two-wheeled liberation, a reminder that you don't have to sit in a box to get where you're going. I'll give darn near any song about bikes one listen through but Coco's got that way with words and a tune that keeps me hitting replay. If you go to her Myspace page you can check out her songs and see what I mean.

While I Got A Bicycle is basically a love song to a wonderful mode of transportation, Intellectual Boys is obviously calculated to appeal to anybody who has ever thought of themselves as a nerd or a geek. And it totally works. The lyrics are clever enough to convince you that not only does Coco like geeks, she is a geek herself. I'm the kind of geek who likes to support the geek singer-songwriters our there, so I'm plugging her work on my blog. The only thing I can't figure out is why Boing Boing or XKCD haven't discovered her yet.

Changes...

If you happened over to the Bike Works Website over the holidays and clicked on EVENTS & NEWS you might have seen this:

Kent Peterson to train full time- Bike Works looking for Shop Manager to fill his shoes

Bike Works much beloved shop manager and bicycle celebrity, Kent Peterson is going to leave his full time position at Bike Works in early March to train full time for this summer’s Tour Divide; an epic self-supported mountain bike race along the great divide from Canada to New Mexico. The route is over 2700 miles of off pavement racing, and Kent returns to the race to reclaim the single speed record he set in 2005: 22 days! Kent will still be a big part of the family here, but we are beginning a search for a new Shop Manager. The job announcement is here.

While the tone of this announcement is a bit to gee-whizzy for my taste (Jake, our enthusiastic Executive Director, had something to do with that) but it's true, I'm stepping down as the Shop Manager at Bike Works. Rather than try to patch somebody in temporarily while I'm gone in the month of June, we figured that a better plan would be to start looking for somebody now to step into that role full-time in March. So if you or somebody you know would like to work at one of the coolest places on earth and you have what it takes to manage a bike shop, click the link above and read through the job announcement.

While I am going to be ramping up my training in March and yeah, I'm spending the month of June racing the Divide, Jake glossed over a couple of details in terms of my future. First off, it will take a lot of prep, a ton of luck and something of a miracle for this old guy to crack Chris Plesko's amazing 19:00:21 record for the 2741 mile course. My old record of 22 days and change was for the 2500 mile border to border route. Jake makes it sound like I'm just going to ride up and take the record back. I'm going to ride like heck (at a persistent, old turtle pace) to see if I can do it, but it's by no means a forgone conclusion. I'm racing to find out if I can do it.

Second, I could see where folks reading the Bike Works announcement might think, "hey Kent must be rich if he can afford to take that much time off to train." Actually, no, that's not the case at all. What is the case is that Bike Works was and is more than a full time job, one of those jobs that you love but that can easily suck up way more than forty hours a week. And when you add on the fact that I pile on 3 hours per day in bike commuting, which is sort of training but not the mountain riding I really need to do, it makes for some damn long days. So I decided to make a change to let me do more real mountain training.

I do need to earn money. Not a lot, I live pretty simply, but I need to earn a living. I've got a few sponsors like Redline and Ergon helping me out with gear and all you blog readers buying stuff on Amazon and sending donations help out, but the simple fact is that like pretty much everybody else in this world, I work. I mostly make my living fixing and selling bikes. And starting in March, I'll be doing that at a shop that is four blocks from my place in Issaquah.

Yep, The Bicycle Center, which has been in Issaquah even longer than I have, is expanding. They are moving into half of the old Allen Furniture store right next door to their current location on Front Street. The other half the building will be the new location for Amante Pizza and Pasta. Starting in March, when I'm not on the trails, I'll be working at the Bicycle Center. My new commute is so short I'll walk to work.

But I'll get my miles in. I live at the base of the Cascades and now I'll have time in the mornings and/or evenings to hit the trails that are right out my back door. I'll still be doing the bigger adventures on my days off and in June I'll head up to Banff and then south along the Rockies. Of course, the stories and the pictures will show up here.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Seattle Cargo Bike Ride

Some cyclists are pure minimalists, their machines are stripped of every extraneous gram. And then there are the cargo folks, whose motto is "sure, bring it along, we've got room."

On the first morning of the new year, I ride north out of Issaquah as the morning light comes over the Cascades. I take the long way to Seattle, up through Redmond and along the north end of the lake. It's a damp, breezy day and there aren't a lot of cyclists out, even though it's what Aaron Goss calls "the first day of biking season." There are a lot of runners on the trail north of Marymoor and a lot of them have numbers on. I figure they are running some kind of New Year's Day event.

I'm headed for another event, the Seattle Cargo Bike Ride. When both Val and Aaron made sure to invite me, I knew I had to go even though my own philosophy these days is something like "if I can't haul it up a mountain on a single speed bike, I can probably do without it." Val assured me I'd fit right in with the cargo crowd and have a great time.

It turns out that, as usual, Val is right. I tend to be overly punctual for these things, so I do a quick orbit of Green Lake, something I realize I'd never actually done in all my years of living in the Seattle area. As I come back around to the basketball courts, I see Val pulling up on his Fuji. The Fuji is Val's "light" bike, where light is a relative term and that relativity is distorted by the massive gravitational pull of his "heavy" bike, the Dread Nought. By the standards of this day, Val's bike and mine are bantam-weights.

I can't even try to list everybody and their bikes and in many ways the pictures speak for themselves. Carl's rig gets the most comments. It's an old Swiss Army bike (there's more to the Swiss than just fine watches and clever red knives) and he's towing a long trailer originally designed to carry casualties from the battlefield. Today he's carrying wood, an ax and a collapsible pot-bellied stove. Other folks have more conventional trailers with more conventional cargo, carrying things like children.

We roll slowly from Green Lake to Golden Gardens and I do mean slowly. At one point a jogger passes us but today is about fun and carrying capacity, not speed. We stop for even more supplies at the Ballard Fred Meyer store and roll into the deteriorating weather.

The wind at the beach at Golden Gardens is fierce but once Val and Carl get the charcoal grill and wood-stove going, we have a fighting chance against the chill. And we have huge amounts of food. I'd brought things that could be eaten cold, things like summer sausage, cheese, crackers and Peanut Butter Cups. The others brought things like bacon and eggs, clam chowder, hot cider and coffee. Of course, even traveling relatively light, I did have the good sense to bring my own mug of coffee.

photo courtesy of Val Kleitz

Despite (or perhaps because of) the weather, the picnic is extremely fun. We all get to gawk at the woman who polar bear swims in the sound and watch the sailboat captains realize this is a better day to be in port. Megan explains the vegan fake-bacon cooked in real bacon fat is really, really good and still vegan in some homeopathic sort of way. We get to find out that if a tree falls in the forest and there's a bunch of cyclists around to hear it, it makes one heck of a racket.

Val's pictures from the day are here and I've included a slide show of my photos at the bottom of this post.




Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Planet Bike Blaze 2 Watt LED Headlight

It's no secret that I use and like the stuff made by Planet Bike. Use the search function on this blog and you'll find me saying various nice things about various Planet Bike products. I was getting ready to write a review of the light I've been commuting with for the past month, the 2 Watt version of the Blaze, but when I checked Amazon a couple of other folks already said pretty much all the nice things I was going to say about this light. So click the link above and read the reviews there and then come back and I'll add a little bit.

OK, it's a nice light. It uses 2 AA cells and it works great with NiMH rechargeable batteries. It works fine for commuting but if I was going to ride all night on a brevet, I'd take some spare batteries just to be safe. I have good night vision and run it on the low setting most of the time and on low it'll run all night. The light uses the same mount as its 1-Watt and 1/2-Watt siblings as well as the Beamer 3 and Beamer 5 lights, something I find handy because I have several bikes and swap various Planet Bike lights between them.

The 2-Watt Blaze project fairly tight cone of light with a bit of spill and as to be expected, on the low setting on the 2-Watt Blaze seems to be just about as bright as the high setting of the 1-Watt Blaze. LEDs seem to run more efficiently at lower power so the 2-Watt on low makes better use of the batteries than running the 1-Watt on high. Plus, it is nice to have the higher beam available for quick, dark descents.

In cold, wet weather I've noticed some condensation inside the lens of the light, but it hasn't caused any problems.

Finally, I prefer the sleek, Darth Vader black of the 2-Watt Blaze to the i-Mac white of the 1-Watt model.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Vashon Island Cycling Tree Huggers

"It's a bike in a tree? No, I'm not going. You and your hippie friends are just going to totally hug it." My son Eric declined my offer to join in the fun of cycling on Vashon Island on the day after Christmas but his dismissal did give a focus to the day. My hippie friends and I would be sure we totally hugged the Bike Tree.

I've written previously about the Vashon Bike Tree and those wishing to follow in our icy tire tracks can find the directions here. On this particular Boxing Day I leave the house before dawn, note that the temperature is a couple of degrees below freezing as I bomb down the Factoria Hill and spin the rear tire on frost a couple of times on the steepish hill right before the turn onto the floating bridge connecting Mercer Island to Seattle. On the Seattle side of the lake I meet up with Mark and Mark (Vande Kamp and Canizaro) and we roll through the tunnel and down the trail. The sun is rising as we roll along Alaska Way, a road we all agree is one of the crappiest commonly cycled roads in Seattle. But traffic is light and it's a good day to ride.

In west Seattle the Genessee hill is white with frost and our tires can't get traction. We walk the steep block, remount our steeds and head to Fauntleroy ferry terminal.

The Marks and I board the ferry and settle in for the trip to Vashon. Liam Moriarty and his brother Tom make the ferry with seconds to spare. Tom moved to Seattle a couple of weeks ago from Kansas and this is his first trip to Vashon Island. Kansas is flat, Vashon is not.

When the ferry docks in Vashon, we meet up with Brad Hawkins and Jon Muellner. Brad had taken the ferry up from Tacoma, where he'd been spending time with family, while Jon had driven down from his home in Port Townsend and come across on the Southworth ferry. A ferry worker warns us about the icy roads, but Brad, who'd just come across the island including the infamous Burma road assures us that "it's not too bad." Some people might hesitate before taking routing advice from a man whose helmet looks like a fistful of M&Ms and bears the proud label "NUTCASE" but those are the people who lack a certain sense of adventure.

While people of extreme sense are still at home asleep and people of moderate sense would stick to the relatively clear Vashon Highway and take the most direct route to the bike tree, my hippie friends and I follow Brad down and up and up and down the many cardiac spikes that comprise Burma Road. Burma Road must have originally been mapped by a drunken Sherpa and in these modern times the road continues to exist mostly because it serves as such a convenient hazing ritual for those cyclists who have recently moved to the Pacific Northwest from Kansas. The only thing more exciting than riding Burma road is riding it on a frosty morning, a fact we are reminded of at every frosty blind turn.

Remarkably, as these words and photos attest, we all lived to laugh about this and tell the tale. We rejoin the main road, find the famous, hidden bike tree and hug the heck out of it. Then it's back into the fog and frost and hills. We roll and chat and separate and regroup. We roll onto Maury Island and snack at the lighthouse. Liam's rattly rack and fender doesn't seem to bother him but they are driving me crazy so I donate two unused M5 bolts from my second set of bottle bosses to the cause of silence and security.

After the huge climb away from the park, the Fellowship of the Chainring splits into two groups with Liam and Tom deciding to take the more direct route north, while the rest of us follow Brad south, to the southern ferry terminal. Tom is now convinced, beyond any doubt, that he is "not in Kansas anymore!"

Brad catches his ferry to Tacoma and the Marks, Jon and I work our way back north. In the town of Vashon Jon spots a sign on Perry's Vashon Burgers "Come in -N- eat or we'll both starve." It's the kind of logic you don't argue with, so we stop -N- eat. It's wonderful.

We catch up with Liam and Tom at the ferry terminal. They also stopped to eat.

It was a wonderful day on the bike, 36 miles of hilly riding on the island with another 56 miles of riding in the there and back again part. And we totally hugged the heck out of that tree.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

As I write this some of my friends are out there riding their bicycles through the shortest night of the year. My wife persuasively argued that I get plenty of night riding on my commute and in the words of Brother Ray, "the night time is the right time to be with the one you love." But there is something special about night riding, something known to randonneurs and all-year, all-weather cycle commuters. Even though this time I chose to be home, to sleep and to write while others ride, I've been out there enough to know something of the draw of the darkness, the wonder of a world feared by many and loved by some.

Things easily taken for granted in the world of light, things like being warm and being able to see, are not free gifts in the night world. The night world is still the frontier, animals lurk in the darkness and may skitter across your path and what lies just beyond your headlight beam could be smooth pavement or a pothole. That edge, the limit of your vision and experience, draws you forward. You can not conquer the night, but you find, with practice, that you can explore it and you may find that you love to explore it.

The legendary randonneur Jack Eason, taught me the single most valuable thing I've ever learned about riding at night. Years ago, riding with Jack on a dark night in the Canadian Rockies, he noted, "you're looking where the light is pointed, don't do that. Look beyond, into the darkness. You'll see what's in the light anyway." Jack was right, he'd learned to navigate a blacked-out London in England's finest hours. And thanks to his lesson, I've had many fine hours on darkened roads, looking not at the light, but at the darkness.

In 1999 I rode Paris-Brest-Paris, alongside several hundred other Americans and thousands of folks from Europe and the rest of the world. In that time, before high-efficiency LED lights and commonly available quality generator hubs, rigging a bike light that would run all night was something of an art form. The American lights tended to be more powerful and we home-brewed battery packs with lots of cells and sent them ahead in drop bags. The French, in general, opted for dimmer solutions and at the time I joked that I expected to see some French fellow with two fireflies in a jar strapped to the front of his bike. But the French riders made it through the night and I think the difference is faith and experience. As a novice randonneur I was putting my faith in electrons and photons and was intent on doing my best to make the night into day. The French, instead, made peace with the night.

In the world of randonneuring the 400K brevet is the distance where most folks have to ride at night. On a couple of 400K rides, I've been riding next to someone who confesses as the sun is setting that they have "never ridden at night before." I always find this amazing. You don't get to the point where you attempt the 400K distance without some training and given the fact that (unless you live at an extremely northern or southern location) it gets dark every night of the year. Those nights are opportunities.

Now I know some folks, perhaps most folks, think it must be more dangerous to ride at night, but I've thought about this and considered the data and I think that while there certainly are some risks, there are other factors that can help to balance out those risks. At the end of the day, so to speak, we make our best choices. I ride at night and I actually think I may be safer riding at night than I am riding in daylight.

There is less traffic at night. It is like riding in a less populated world. Fewer drivers on the road translates into fewer chances for collision.

But what about those stats that show more accidents at night? David Smith's analysis of a couple of years of accident data shows that yes, unlit cyclists do die. But lights and reflective gear do a lot to make a cyclist visible. In the photo at the top of this post, I'm the guy whose helmet and sash are glowing in the reflected light. Over the years I've tried to enlighten folks (pun intended!) about the virtues of lights and reflective gear. This post is part of that continuing effort.

But there are drunk drivers at night, people say. Well, yes there are. And there are distracted drivers during the day. I do try to avoid the bar scene but some times, especially on brevets, you will encounter a drunk. My friend Jon, lit-up and well-reflected, had a memorable encounter with a gentleman lit-up in the other sense, on a brevet a few years ago. The fellow drove slowly past Jon, pulled his truck over and flagged Jon down. "What youse guys are doing, it's really dangerous man. I mean, I drink and drive. I shouldn't, but I do. But you guys, you shouldn't be here, 'cause it's dangerous. But youse guys, I can see you from a long ways off. So you're doing something really dangerous, but your doing it in pretty good way. But you should know guys like me are here."

Night is a time when we as riders stand out. In the bright light of day, even our bright clothes can blend into the busy background. At night, we stand out. One dark, rainy night I was stopped at a light (yeah, I do things like that, call me a rebel) and a lady in a SUV pulls up along side me. She rolls down her window and says "you're very well-lit, thank you." 'Thanks for not running me over," I reply. I never quite know what to say in those situations.

The night time is the right time to be with the one you love. But sometimes, by circumstance or choice, we ride at night. With some lights, some reflective gear and some practice, it can be wonderful.

Ride safe out there and keep 'em rolling,

Kent

Cold Snap Cycling

At the point where water turns to ice, many cyclist turn sedentary. Sure, hearty souls who live in places like Minnesota or Alaska persevere in temps well below zero, but when you live in a more temperate climate you can make the very sensible case that if you wait for a couple of days, things will warm up so why not take it easy? And those slick roads, packed with SUVs and harried Christmas shoppers probably are not the safest places for a cyclist to be. This is why people buy rollers, indoor trainers or gym memberships. Or why they stay inside, packing on an extra layer of fat for the winter.

The high temperature today might reach the freezing point of water and Mike, Mark and I are riding. We are going where most of my "fun" rides go these days, east and up on trails and car-free, gated gravel roads. I'm the instigator of this action, the guy who sent the email referring to this as a "freeze your butt ride." I sent the email to 72 people. A vast majority of the recipients have good excuses or what is sometimes referred to as "common sense." Mike, Mark and I all have the things you need if you might be lacking in common sense. Things like warm clothes, studded bike tires and restless natures.

I have a Thermos Mug of coffee hanging from a carabiner on my Camelbak. The Camelbak is frozen but the coffee is still warm. I'm wearing multiple layers of wool, fleece and nylon and when I breathe out the moisture condenses in a cloud that quickly vanishes into the dry air. It has not snowed here, but the cold pulls the moisture from the air and deposits it in frost patches on the ground. Still water freezes, but the creek before us is tumbling swiftly and it's wider than I'd recalled. In August, the last time I was here, I'd splashed across it, hopping from rock to rock.

The rocks are slick now, many coated with a dangerous sheen of ice. Mike has the longest legs and the best rock-hopping judgment. He gets across and we pass the bikes to him. Mark and I have shorter legs and more cautious natures. Mark also as super-slick cleats on the soles of his shoes. After much debate of rock-to-rock paths and the addition of a handy board Mark found in the woods, we make it across. I manage to have my right foot slip off one rock and wind up wringing the damp out of one set of wool socks.

The day is bright and cold and while we are headed up Rattlesnake Ridge, we still are not quite sure where these old roads lead. The studded tires perform brilliantly and I'm thrilled with the way my new-old bike is riding. I don't have studded tires that fit my 29er Flight and when this 1985 Mongoose ATB Pro came into Bike Works last week and our Recycling & Reuse Coordinator priced it a $50 as-is, I knew I was getting another bike. After replacing the cables, housing, dry-rotted tires, and uncomfortable saddle, the bike was ready to roll. A couple of hours with some Chromax polish and the bike shone like a jewel.

We ride up, then down, then up some more. Then up a bunch more and we come the world's most uninformative road sign, two weather-blasted wooden arrows, one pointed where we've been, one pointing the other way. Years of wind and rain have erased any fragment of useful information. Mark's GPS tells us we are up in somewhere very blank. My map, brilliantly left back in Issaquah, tells us nothing. The time of day, the lowering sun and Mike all wisely counsel us to go back the way we came.

The descent is quick and cold. Studded tires rumble on the gravel but go silent when they grab the ice. Back at the creek, we cross using my method, using the bikes as a crutch and a third leg as we hop from rock to rock. We'd noted on our first crossing and now investigate the oddest thing, Maglights in the water. Fishing around with a stick, we retrieve not one, not two, but three different Maglights from the depths of the creek. How they got there, we have no idea. Actually we have a couple of ideas. One involves some four-wheeler, stuck and dropping lights and swearing. My more fanciful theory involves there being some upstream vein of Maglights and that we could make our fortunes by staking a claim to the mining rights for this patch of land. I'm sure we'll never know the true story of how the lights came to be in the creek, but I can tell you that these are tough lights. Two out of the three lit right up when we pulled them from the creek and I bet the third one just needs new batteries.

Mark flies past me on the post-creek descent, uttering what I momentarily suspect will be his last words, "oh shit, no brakes!!!" I guess dunking sub-freezing aluminum rims into an icy creek is a good way to coat them with ice. My old-school Cunningham-designed brakes are still working great and eventually friction reasserts itself and Mark manages to somehow get his Bianchi under control. The three of us pause to chip the worst of the ice off our machines and then continue down toward the world of men.

We roll down the freeway and the frontage road between Preston and Highpoint. The sun is setting as we roll down the gravel road by Tradition Lake and the trail underneath the power lines. Our lights pick out the rocks along the trail behind the high school and the beams glint and glisten in the frost.

In the cold, if you stop, you tend to freeze in place. But if you move, and keep moving, you find the damnedest things. Things like Maglights in a creek, things like sign posts that tell you nothing. Things that you don't understand.

There are odd things on the trail, weird things. Like the fortune cookie fortune we saw this morning, "Your mind will make your body rich."

We can't understand or explain everything.

It's better to be moving. I don't know why, but I know that it is.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent