Frozen Slugs on the LHT: My Ride of Wrong Turns

 

Delaware and Raritan Canal at Province Line Road, Lawrence Township

25 January 2022

I'm late with this one for two reasons: one, I wasn't sure what to write, and two, I'm working on a wiki for the lab, which, it turns out, is a lot like blogging.

So anyway, Sunday wasn't as cold as Saturday. It was still cold though, 28 degrees when I left the house on Fozzie. I'd heard there was a detour of the bike path through the construction at the Lenox site, so I turned in there to find it. Knowing things would be messed up, I didn't bother to map the route on my GPS.

I didn't find it. I found myself at the edge of what will soon be condos at the edge of an office park and next to an historic property that no thin line of trees is going to mask. 

I doubled back and headed to the historic Brearley house by using the road. When I arrived at the lot, Tom was just coming back from seeking the trail from this end. "It's completely gone," he said.

The eight of us made our way around the potholes on the dirt road leading away from the house. Luis called out to me that I'd ridden right past the detour path stuck halfway up the dirt road. We turned around and took it. The surface was hastily smoothed dirt and gravel. It sucked. 

Four of us (me, Rickety, Martin, and Frederic) were on gravel bikes. Tom, Luis, and Heddy had mountain bikes. And Ming was on her road bike, which has wide tires, but I was still worried that the mushy surfaces we'd encounter would send her sideways. 

It's been a year since I've been on the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. There's still construction at the Lawrenceville School, and all the LHT guide signs are AWOL. Luis and Frederic knew how to find the one open gate leading out of the place on the Route 206 side. 

Then I rode straight past the turn onto Craven Lane. I realized after the trail became less groomed that we were on the Johnson Trolley Line path. No matter. I liked it. When we reached Lawrenceville-Pennington Road, we turned north. The trolley line would dead end at the highway, so there was no point in staying on it. There's talk -- there's been talk for decades, but it's getting louder -- of putting a pedestrian overpass over the highway to connect the two ends of the trolley line trail. With that, we could go all the way to Ewing in the woods. 

Turning on Bergen, I led us back to Village Park. When we reached the Pole Farm, I got to ride on the new pavement for the first time. This used to be a long, slow, gravel grind up a gradual hill leading out of the Delaware and into the Raritan watershed. It would always be against the wind and feel much more difficult than it had any reason to be. That was then. Now, we all have gravel bikes and we're gliding across the blacktop. Ming, seeing pavement, did her Ming thing and took off like the rocket she is. The folks on mountain bikes still had to grind; riding a mountain bike on blacktop is like riding through glue.

We encountered a big patch of ice in the woods, gray ice, ice that's on its way to melting. I signaled everyone to walk across. Tom came along and rode straight over it. We all held our breaths as he made it to the other side.

I nearly missed a turn at Rosedale Park; I'd heard someone wanted a bathroom and rode up to the building by the lake. I was about to continue around the lake when Heddy asked if we weren't going across the bridge. Whoops. I doubled back, only to see another path curving down from where we'd been.

In Pennington, I stopped to zoom in on the eagle nest across the field. It was empty.

When we got to Wargo Road, some people took the path and some stayed on the street. Behind me, Luis and Frederic were speaking French. 

The route still goes through the little neighborhood on the other side of Wargo. Once again, the trail signs were missing. I wasn't sure which turns the trail took, because I ride through here enough that I know several ways to get to the other side. Luis knew, so I followed him. 

Up past the Mount Rose distillery, where the path goes into the woods towards Carter Road, we encountered more ice. Nobody rode across this one.

At Carter, the route is on the road all the way to Cleveland Road. Luis said there were paths through the NJ Bio campus, so I let him lead.

When we crossed Carter Road, I thought Tom was with us. He wasn't. We were down in the parking lot, but, through the trees, I could see him on the other side of Carter Road. Rickety turned back to wave him over.

The paths Luis took us on led us to a disused service road that took us straight back to Carter. I was hoping we'd get dumped onto Cleveland. Oh well. At least we avoided three quarters of the Carter Road traffic. On the official trail map, there's a dotted line keyed as "future," that would go through this site and come out on Cleveland. 

We had to climb a couple of hills on Cleveland and again on the other side of the Stony Brook after the pedestrian bridge on Province Line. 

I rode right past the entrance to Carson Road Woods; Tom called me back.

"Are you gonna take the canal?" he asked.

"Nah," I said, figuring we'd stick to Princeton Pike's bike lane.

When we reached Province Line, I changed my mind. We got separated at the light on Princeton Pike. Frederic and I rode ahead to the canal entrance instead of waiting. The road is too narrow and the traffic too heavy for us to stop and wait anywhere else.

As we stood there, a little boy came riding up from the south. Frederic immediately started speaking to him in French, which was confusing for half a second until I figured out that this was the son he'd been talking about. By now, the rest of the group had caught up. There was some discussion and confusion about Frederic and Luis leaving the ride here and continuing on Quaker Road, which made no sense to me because the towpath was right here.

I took pictures while they worked it out.

I've never seen this side when it hasn't been flooded:

This section of towpath is always a mess. There are often large puddles and washouts, and, if not that, the surface is mushy and muddy. We rode along it anyway. I was behind Ming, hoping her rear tire wouldn't slide out from under her.

There's a grassy berm next to the path. More often than not, we ride on the berm, which, while bumpy, is dry. After a few minutes of squishing through the mud, I'd had enough, and aimed Fozzie up the berm.

Fozzie is not a mountain bike. Fozzie is a gravel bike. Fozzie does not move like a mountain bike. Where Grover would have been nimble enough to carry the front wheel over the lip of the berm, Fozzie was not. I slowly toppled over instead. It wasn't much of a fall, being that I had been pretty much up against the ground anyway. I dusted myself off as the rest of the group passed below me. I was going to have a few bruises, one on my hiney. 

I pedaled into the parking lot second to last; Tom had gone up on the berm too, behind me. I thought I was the last one. I'd lost him twice today. It's his bike. With its beefy build and shock fork, it's meant for singletrack trails, stuff I can't even ride on. When the path is mucky or icy, he kicks our butts; we have to walk.

The last time I was on the LHT, I had my mountain bike. Tom and I were dead last, struggling to keep up with the gravel bike crowd. I wonder if there's a gravel bike in his future. I'm sure glad I swapped Grover for Fozzie.