Fat Bike Diaries #4

MILE 80.80801

Replaced the fluckin flat and patched it up for a spare. A pair of pinholes were the source of the leak. Drunken scoundrels breaking their beer bottles in Japanese Gulch!

I also used this downtime to construct some mud flaps out of an old corrugated plastic sign. How will they work? ¡Vamos a ver!

MILE 81.818181

Followed a DNR road into the Tomtits (tee hee!) looking for a way up Mount Sultan. It started out easy enough, then the road took a turn for the steep!

So steep as it were, that the grade was fortified with staggered concrete slabs. Someone could get going suicidally fast down that hill.

A second even longer section of the slabs were waiting after the first. Beyond that second monstrous push, the road again became ridable.

Didn’t get to the top, but got a better look at the combination of twists and turns that it might take to get up there.

At one point I encountered a chain link gate blocking a bridge which spans Youngs Creek.

Eintritt Verboten!

Oh yeah… the mud flaps did alright, but admittedly there wasn’t too much mud to flap.

MILE 95

Thought I’d drop in at Ravensdale Retreat since I had some shopping to do in the area.

Startled an elk toward the east end of the park!

The trails were wet enough to really give the mud flaps a run around. They did ok, but needed a few adjustments. I also tried to form the front flap around the wheel a bit more for aesthetic reasons. Fancy Schmanzy!

I guess I could paint them, but I kinda like the raw “Post-consumercalyptic utilitarian” look.

MILE 100

After much procrastination I decided to leave the house, er, the garden rather. Always a tough call during the spring; Garden? Adventure? Time is ticking buddy! You only live once!

Whoa, shit! Father Time has been drinking and is swinging the belt around!

So after that brief hallucination, I decided to go to McDonald Mountain. I’d made it most the way last winter, being turned back by snow that was just too deep for the Alloymule.

Some new squeeking became evident on the trudge up the hill and before long it was all I could focus on. Good in a way perhaps, to distract the mind from the uphill slogging…

I passed one couple that were hiking down the hill, after that I had the rest of the mountain to myself…

This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the best pushing techniques, and whether or not I was really pushing a bike at all, and not just some simulated bike in some simulated universe!

At the top there’s a radio tower, it seems real, but I mean, what is really real in a simulation, ya?

If you go a little above and beyond the simulated radio tower, a trail will lead you along a beautifully rendered ridge to an incredibly detailed representation of a clearcut, or least it was in May of ’18…

Someone had skilfully programmed a pair of benches out of the logging slash which gives you a place to rest your bones and look over at the “big probably unreal mountain”.

¡Bien hecho, amigo!

Wow, what a view. I wonder how far the world is rendered beyond my field of view… I could have sworn I packed a sandwich… How did this bench really get here?

I could sit here and try to crack life’s toughest nuts, but I’d better be getting down the mountain to get back to:

•Crippling wage labor simulator 2018•