Coe - Bear Mountain ride

An almost-10k Coe ride, on an unusually cool summer day. What can I say? Nearly 10k is not 10k, but in the end it’s just a number. If the foot was defined to be 2.8% smaller than it is now, there would have been no complaints.

If you look at the elevation profile you see that I did do some work to get there though – I decided to climb up Middle Steer after I made it back to the parking lot, to make up for the shortfall; not really a tempting proposition when you’re at mile 50 in your Coe ride. While at it, I managed to sweep up both Jeff and his friend Paul, as well as Roy. Like Jeff earlier, I think I must have been hallucinating, since I was convinced that when I’d turn around a couple hundred yards above my meeting spot with Roy, near a tree, I’d make 10k. Hallucinating, or too much lured into the thought of enjoying the post ride beers with my Coe buddies. And I probably counted too much on my Garmin lowballing the elevation total.

As for Jeff’s hallucinations, I think he must have had one of the most exciting Cross Canyon descents that can be imagined, and someone should extract a detailed ride report from him (it will feature a bird, venomous reptiles and a big cat).

This is probably my longest (in distance) Coe ride ever (need to check), so I’m pretty happy with myself, even with the GPS snafu. And I went up Bear Mountain after doing HH-HQ featuring Middle Ridge, and lived to tell about it; as Charlie, who I rode with a bit in the morning, once mentioned (I think): Bear Mountain is the ‘gift that keeps giving’. For those who think they’ve seen the Coe steeps, I recommend they check it out: this climb is quite a caliber (take the steepest pitch of Poverty Flat, five times, and insert some 20% grade stretches in between where you can ‘recover’ and you get an idea. Oh, and add a Hobbs style (Blue Ridge section) of nearly-unclimbable goodness right in the beginning.

It took me almost until the bottom of Tule Pond for to recover from Bear Mountain; before that I felt at times in a not so happy place, I think my food didn’t go in too well or I started eating too late. Earlier, Middle Ridge was a blast as always and thoughts of adding Jackass – Black Oak Spring – Rock House Ridge were put aside since that would have been a bit hard to combine with the Bear Mountain loop; on a very good day, when it’s a little cooler perhaps – yes, even on this cool summer day and even when Roy said he was freezing while he was at Mississippi Lake, it was a times not cool enough for my Northern European constitution.

Besides an unpleasant encounter with a bush of thistles on the Narrows, intimate contact with sharp branches and overgrowth and the abundance of burrs and seeds of varying degrees of stickiness not much to complain about; and after my little dip I felt quite decent – not decent enough for Serpentine though, no big deal since I was inclined to do the Lyman-Willson descent, which is quite fun in its own right. And after rehydrating on the parking lot (read: New Belgian IPA) I felt spirited enough to tackle the Middle Steer out-and-back to wrap up, with the aforementioned consequences.

When we left the lot after the post-ride festivities had been wrapped up, Charlie’s car was still there; I hope he had a good and safe ride as well.

See also:

Charlie’s ride

Jeff on his trail encounters