lost valley, 10 years later

i haven't been out to ride lost valley in (i think) 10 years. i could be wrong, but the last time i rode out there was a moutain bike race in the summer of '96. (i got third...eric martin won, john matthews got second.) i realized that tuesday would be the last dry day for a while, so i took the opportunity to visit.

lost valley was mostly jeep double track, and outright gravel roads. that has changed somewhat, with very cool sections of single track splattered in here and there, most notably the last 10 minutes of the loop.

it's an 8 mile loop, which starts out with an impossibly boring 3 miles of jeep track. once the first climb hits, the trail branches off into some cool single track, which all too quickly returns to the double track. back into some narrower stuff around the wooden bridge, back to the boring gravel road, finally into the cool stuff before the end.

i went backward once to ride the cool final single track, then i rode up the middle of the loop via the gravel climb. the gravel climb was apparently an old asphalt road that has deteriorated into broken sections of pavement and gravel. it takes a good 5 or 6 minutes to get all the way to the top. fortunately, once at the top, you are at the fastest section of the whole shibang, exactly halfway through the trail. that way, i got to ride the last single track again.

all told, i road about an hour and a half, which is plenty, given that it was only 32 degrees and my fingers had ceased to be fingers and were now simply frozen sausages. a nice byproduct of riding there is that it's only 20 minutes from work.