Yesterday, the Sloth and I circumnavigated the Capital Area Greenbelt on our bicycles.

We stopped around the halfway mark to brew up some coffee. Sloth had a new coffee filter he wanted to try out, and I had a new stove that I wanted to play with.

I had an entire pannier’s worth of coffee brewing accouterments. Stove, fuel bottle, extra water, pot, french press, etc. It all adds up to a lot of pannier space, but was well worth it.

Due to some miscalculations while lighting the stove, I ended up with a small fuel spill, and a gigantic ball of flame. This seemed to amuse / horrify the joggers and dog-walkers who were passing by.

Nonetheless, we had our coffee, and it was good. Personally, I think coffee / tea breaks should be mandatory on any ride over 15 miles when it’s less than 50 degrees out. Anything less would be uncivilized.

Fortified with caffeine, we soldiered on through the gigantic traffic disaster of the Farm Show. We made a few wrong turns (the signage on the Greenbelt is a little spotty), and ended up with about 21 miles — my longest ride for the week/month/year!

The new year appears to be off to a good start, and ambitious plans for a multi-day tour are already underway.

Temperatures were in the mid 20′s both ways, and it was snowing. No fewer than three of my coworkers made comments about my mental health.

Huzzah!

One other accomplishment – I didn’t list this as a resolution, but I did manage to finish my degree program at Penn State this year.

Being a grown-up with a job, mortgage, etc. and going to night school is a good way to loose your mind. It eats up all your free time, and leaves you with very little time to pursue other goals.

I’m going to blame part of my resolution failure on that damn degree. I was actually doing pretty well with my bike / fitness goals up until school started in August.

I was losing weight at a lovely clip until August, then everything went to shit, and I gained back half of the 40 pounds I lost.

My cycling mileage numbers were starting to get respectable (for me, at least) until August, as well.

At any rate, I won’t have school to use as an excuse this year, so here’s what I’m gonna try to do in 2012:

Lose another 70 pounds
The primal/paleo thing seemed to work for me, as long as I stuck to it. I lost 40 pounds in 7 months on it — an average of about 6 pounds a month. If I can maintain 6 pounds a month through the whole year, I should be down 72 pounds for the year. That would be huge. I know bicycling was a hell of a lot more fun when I was lighter.

Ride 1000 miles
There’s really no reason this shouldn’t be doable. I’ve done more than this in years past. I’d only have to ride my bike to work 100 times to meet this, and that’s not even counting recreational rides on the weekends, etc.

Metric Century
Leftover goal from last year. I’m even setting a date, so I don’t put it off and think I’ll “get to it sometime.” September 29th, 2012. This is happening, come hell or high water.

I think those are goals enough. I have more, but I’ll probably have enough trouble meeting these.

So, if anyone out there still reads this blog, happy new year! I hope you have good luck with whatever you want to accomplish in 2012.

Bars are wrapped. 700×42 Marathon Winter tires are mounted. MKS touring pedals for maximum shoe versatility.

We started at the Lewisburg end of the trail, and headed west toward Mifflinburg.

There’s a bathroom and a parking lot at the Lewisburg end.

The trail is really well done. It’s paved for about a mile or so on each end, and it’s crushed limestone in the middle.

The scenery is about what you’d expect. Lots of farms, old Mennonite ladies hanging laundry out to dry, cows, etc.

The railroad ties are still piled along the trail in a few places. The tracks were torn out only recently.

There are a few interpretive signs along the way.

The trail was really, really busy. I was starting to regret that my cross-check doesn’t have a bell, because the herds of pedestrians might have benefited from a bell. It doesn’t really feel right yelling “on your left” to old ladies.

We played leap frog with this contraption most of the way.

It was piloted by a couple towing their granddaughter in the trailer. The grandfather told me that the granddaughter has logged over 100 miles so far this year in the WeeHoo trailer.

When we made it back to the parking lot, Klinutus asked me to pose for some action shots for a photography class he’s taking. He was experimenting with motion blur or some such thing. Anyhow, the pictures came out pretty well. My Cross-Check and I are stunningly handsome, if I do say so myself.

Anyhow, it’s a really nice trail. You should go ride it before winter sets in.

Read all about it at BVRT.org

Winter is coming, so I’m reconfiguring my Cross-Check for frozen commuting duties. The build is inspired (more or less) by Doug’s “Belt-Check”.

It’s a 62cm Surly Cross-Check frame, with an all Sturmey-Archer drivetrain. The rear wheel is a Sturmey-Archer XL-RD5(W) laced to a Salsa Delgato Cross rim by Jim Thill of Hiawatha Cyclery.

This gives me 5 speeds and 90mm drum brakes. The whole works lives inside the hub shell, so it’s all kept out of the snow/ice/slush/salt/slop we tend to have around here in the winter time.

Power is transferred from the pedals to the hub by a Sturmey-Archer FCS73 crankset.

The chainring has 44 teeth, and drives a 23-tooth sprocket in the rear, which gives gears from 85″ to 33″ – not really as low as I’d prefer, but that’s pretty much as low as I can safely take this hub.

It shifts with a snazzy little Sturmey Archer barcon. The cable is routed along the top tube, through an old-school S/A pulley, and then down the seat stay. Hopefully this will keep the cable up and out of the winter road slop as much as possible.

I really tried to make this bike work with Albatross bars, but I never really liked it that way, so now, she’s sporting a pair of Nitto dirt drops, which I like a whole lot better.

Yes, I know my cables are a mess. Maybe I’ll get around to tidying them up after I wrap the bars.

Winter commuting means riding in the dark. So I got a Busch & Müller Lumotec IQ Cyo-R headlight powered by a Sturmey Archer XL-FDD dyno hub.

This headlight rocks. The Dark is scared of it and gets the hell out of the way. The XL-FDD hub also has the same 90mm drum brakes as the back hub, so no worries about wearing out my rims with cruddy brake pads.

Commuting (for me, at least) also means hauling a bit of cargo. Usually, cargo is limited to a change of clothes, and my lunch. I mounted a Nitto Campee rack in the rear, and a little Nitto M-12 up front. I’m not really sure I’ll ever put anything on the front, but the rack is really cute, and it makes a nice place to mount the headlight.

I still need to come up with a better set of pedals. Those rubber platform pedals really suck if they’re wet. I’ve got a pair of 40mm marathon winter studded tires in the garage that I’ll probably mount in the next week or two, or whenever we start getting overnight lows below freezing on a regular basis.

Tada! There she is in all her glory. Other than pedals, tail light, and some handlebar tape, I think I’m ready for winter.

We stopped by this covered bridge to take a picture or two.

A couple of miles later, we crossed into the State Forest.

We had a big mountain to climb to get to our campsite, but it was starting to get dark. We wanted enough daylight to gather a big pile of firewood, since the forecast was for cold, cold, and more cold. I wasn’t sure we’d make it to the site before dark, so we started to look for any good site we could find.

We couldn’t find anything suitable on the north side of the mountain, so we climbed (haha, we walked) over the mountain, and rode down to our site, just as the sun started to go down.

When we got to the site, we discovered that the forest spirits had blessed us with a big pile of firewood, left by some previous campers. The only downside was that the wood was soaking wet from the recent monsoons and freak snow storm.

It took a long time and an Esbit tablet, but we got a fire going.

Good thing, too. It was miserably cold. The forecast was calling for 26 degrees, but I call bullshit. I didn’t have a thermometer, but it was cold. Cold enough for stream to come off your pee. And that’s cold.

I experimented with cooking and making hot cocoa with an alcohol stove. Alcohol kind of sucks in the cold, but I eventually had a hot dinner and a big hot mug of hot chocolate. I later figured out that you need to keep the alcohol in your pocket so it stays warm.

We had the traditional bullshitting session around the campfire until it was so cold we couldn’t stand it anymore, and so we went to bed.

With the early bedtime and daylight savings time nonsense, I was awake by 4:30 the next morning. I got up and made a pot of coffee. After I finished my coffee, I got cold again, and got back in my bivy. I laid in my bivy, looking at the stars for about an hour. I saw 4 shooting stars, and thought that it was pretty nice not to be in a tent, even though my bivy and Thermarest were glazed over with a nice heavy coating of frost.

Sloth got out of his tent to go pee, and said it was cold. He went back to bed, and declared that he wasn’t coming out until the sun was out to warm thing up. I stayed in my bivy and kept on looking at the stars until the stars went away and the sky turned blue.

I decided to go have some breakfast, but my cliff bar was frozen solid. So, I made a second pot of coffee, and dunked it in the coffee to thaw it out. This actually turned out to taste wonderful, and I think I’ll keep dunking my cliff bars in coffee even when they’re not frozen from here on out.

At long last, the sun came up over the mountain, and actually started to warm things up. Sloth got out of bed to make some oatmeal, while I wandered off into the woods to dig a cat hole (this is a wild campsite without facilities).

We broke camp, loaded the bikes, and were on our way and rolling down the mountain. It was a nice long descent. I was flying down a gravelly road on over-inflated 35mm tires, and I think my brains almost got rattled out of my head.

When we made it to the bottom of the mountain, I looked down at my handlebar-mounted GPS to see how fast we were going.

CALAMITY!

GPS was no longer there! Must have rattled loose on the way down the mountain.
My legs were already beyond fried at this point, and there was no way in hell I was riding back up the mountain to look for it. I honestly would have been lucky to make it back to the car (which was less than 10 miles away). So, I had to radio for a rescue.

Klinutus and Evil sister came and picked us up, found the lost GPS, and shuttled us and our bikes back to the starting line.

Instead of the 20 miles we had planned for day two, we rode about 7, and then ate gigantic cheeseburgers.

As we exited the cheeseburger establishment, we saw a young lady eyeballing our bikes. She said her dad was a frame builder in Philly, and that she liked touring bikes because most people ride hybrids.

Sloth and I are reasonably convinced that this mystery woman’s father is Bilenky, but neither of us had the presence of mind to ask, and didn’t want to come across as strange frame builder groupies. She was impressed to learn that we camped out, and told us the official temp was around 24 degrees that night.

I think this makes the coldest night I’ve ever slept without a tent or mummy bag.

For those of you curious about gear:
I was under a JRB Mt. Rogers quilt on a Therm-a-rest neoair, inside a cabelas XPG bivy.

I was very comfortable with this setup, except for my head, because my hat kept falling off.

This was a fun trip, and we’re even considering doing a second one this year; possibly in the Tuscarora State Forest.

Update:
The Sloth has written up a more entertaining account of our adventure on his site.

Lara’s website says the grand opening for the BVRT is going to be Nov 5th. They’re having a 4 miles walk/run to celebrate.

Hooray!

The first (and last) thing to do before heading out for a camping trip is to check the weather forecast. Weather forecasts are worthless more than 24 hours beforehand, so check it right before you get packed. If there is a slight chance of drizzle, you can probably get by with just a bivy. If there is a chance of some rain, you need a tarp. If it might pour cats and dogs, or there’s a chance of thunderstorms, you want either a big tarp, or a tent.

Picking your spot:

First things first, though. As long as you’re not staying in a campground, you have some flexibility in where to lay down. If it rains, you might get wet, so pick a good spot. Look around for a spot that’s flat and level (or nearly so). If you lay down on a slope, you might slide off your sleeping pad, and that sucks.

You also want a spot that’s a few inches higher than the surrounding area. If it rains hard, you don’t want to sleep in a spot where water is likely to pool up.

Pine Trees:

If heavy rain is not in the forecast, and if you only brought a bivy, you can sleep under the lowest branches of a big pine tree. All the pine needles above you will catch the big drops if it starts to drizzle. You might not stay 100% dry, but a good pine tree will keep a lot of rain away. Pine trees also smell nice. Additionally, they usually drop tons of soft fluffy pine needles on the ground, which are nice to sleep on. Make sure to look up in the tree to make sure there are no big, dead branches that might fall on you in the middle of the night.

Here is a diagram depicting the correct place to sleep when using a big pine tree to lessen the rain.

Bivy Sacks:
A bivy is basically a waterproof bag that you sleep in. Put your sleeping bag or quilt inside it, and crawl in. Over the years, I have carried a Cabela’s one, a Hilleberg one, and one that I made myself. A bivy will keep the rain off you, but the ventilation is bad, and you might get sweaty.

Here is a picture of a bunch of my jackass friends sleeping in bivy sacks.

Tarps:
A tarp is just a rectangle of waterproof fabric. You set it up with two (or more) sticks, some string, and at least 6 stakes. They can be a little tricky to setup, until you’ve done it a time or two. They keep you dry in everything but wind-driven sideways rain. You can set them up under a tree to filter out some of the heavier rain – like this.

When I don’t expect it to rain, I carry a 58″x 104″ tarp which doubles as a rain poncho. This particular model weighs 8oz, and is made in Williamsport, PA. It rocks, and you should get one. You’re going to want a rain jacket of some sort anyways. You might was well bring one that doubles as a shelter.

This is the poncho setup as a shelter.

Here it is in super-hero cape mode:

If there’s a reasonably good chance of rain, I carry an 8′x10′ tarp. Weighs 14 oz, still made in Williamsport.

One of the best things about a tarp is that you can see out all around the perimeter. In the middle of the night, you might hear woodland creatures scurrying about. In a tent, you will be convinced that there is a family of grizzly bears coming to eat you. In a tarp, you can quickly look around and see that it’s just a chipmunk, and go back to sleep.

Tents:
When all hell is expected to break loose, a tent may be in order (although an 8×10 tarp is pretty weatherproof). Tents are expensive, heavy, and usually more trouble than they’re worth. They do keep the bugs out, though. Tents give you the feeling of “going inside” at the end of the day. I feel that this somewhat defeats the purpose of going camping in the first place, but some people get a sense of security sleeping “in” something. Tents are also nice in a crowded campground, because you can change your clothes without offending the sensibilities of the church ladies in the neighboring camp site.

Here’s a matrix of my thinking on the pros and cons of various shelter strategies:

So, there you have it. You now know how to sleep in the woods without getting wet. Up next, how to stay warm.