Columbia Trail Diversion Booster

 

Columbia Trail, High Bridge, NJ

4 September 2022

Burned out on leading, I was more than happy to sign onto Marty and Bobbi's Columbia Trail ride on Saturday morning. I got everything ready on Friday evening, including knocking a fair amount of canal towpath from my trail bike shoes.

I got up early on Saturday morning. Distracted by a spider web in the back yard,

I left the house ten minutes later than I had planned. High Bridge is 45 minutes from my house. It was looking like I would arrive three minutes before the start of the ride. At a red light, I called Marty. "I'm gonna pull in at 8:27," I said. 

"All right," he replied, "But the ride doesn't start till 9." Derp.

This gave me time to drive up to the Hilltop Deli, one of our refuges during my hellish Double Reservoir route. I was glad to see they'd survived the pandemic. "The community was great," he said. They kept him going. I bought two muffins and headed down to the center of town to a little coffee shop at the bottom of the hill. I bought two muffins from them, too. Jack and I always split the muffins as dessert after dinner; four muffins will last us four days. 

The front parking lot was already full at 8:40. The rear one was nearly full too. 

M and B gathered us together to go over the route. Earlier in the week, I had offered a detour down to the Ken Lockwood Gorge. I warned that there's not much road left in some spots, and that we'd have to walk our bikes over at least one Ida washout.

Brian S, who is mainly a trail rider, upped the ante: If we turned downhill on Mill Road, we could get onto a path that would take us past Lake Solitude.

"Ooo!" I said. "Let's do that!"

What he didn't tell us was that, once we turned off Mill Road, we'd be on a path that made me think we were trespassing. We weren't, he assured me. The path led to a little bridge over the Raritan. I stopped for pictures.

On the other side, things got rough. The path turned into single-track, uphill. I nearly wiped out on a sandy spot when my left cleat got stuck in the pedal (it's been doing that since I got the bike, and it doesn't matter which shoes I'm wearing or how loose I make the pedal). I managed to stay upright and proceded up a hill of broken asphalt. 

At the top, Brian made a sharp hairpin turn. I kept going straight, into a driveway, to signal to everyone else what was going on. 

Having seen the profile for the GPS download, none of us was expecting to have to climb at all today. Yet here we were, gasping for air a mile in. "You can blame me and Brian for this!" I said. 

The hairpin took us to a paved road that went uphill some more. We were on River Road, which is where I wanted to be eventually anyway. We passed the lake on our left. I didn't stop for pictures because much of the view was obscured by trees. 

We gathered ourselves at the intersection of Cokesbury Road and River Road. "Hey, Jim!" I called out, pointing in the direction we were not going. "You know what that hill is?"

"No."

"Pedal, ya pussies!" I'm a horrible person.

River Road runs out of pavement at the entrance to the Ken Lockwood Gorge. There's a ramp that leads out over the river. Only Bobbi and I took pictures.

The path is not meant for bikers, or, if it is, it's been a long time since anyone tried to make it passable. Dirt road potholes are one thing; gravel bikes can handle them. Downed trees are another. Here, we got to separate the tall people, who lifted their bikes over the trunk, from the small people. All we short folks had to do was duck a little.

"You can blame me for this part!" I called out as the rest of the crew came through. I took some pictures of the river. 

I could see from the lines on the rocks how low the water was.

We came upon a stone bridge that reminded me of the Acadia National Park carriage road over Upper Hadlock Pond.

(Acadia: 

)

The next downed tree had been cut so that we could shimmy through.

I took more river pictures at some point:

Then came the big washout. I was too busy watching my feet as we clambered over babyhead rocks on foot. Only Brian and Chris stayed on their bikes.

Bobbi had Things To Say when we got to the end of that. Once again, I begged to take the blame. She had a great take on it all, though: Now she's done it and seen it, and if she hadn't, today would have been just another ride on the Columbia Trail.

At Hoffmans Crossing, we got back onto the trail. From there, it was smooth pedaling. The trail is wide enough that we barely had to break our pace to make way for walkers in our direction or anyone coming towards us. 

Somewhere north of Califon, we stopped on a bridge over a Raritan River tributary. Another trail rider offered to take our picture with Bobbi's camera. In a rare moment, I let myself be photographed, standing behind my bike and partially obscured by another rider.

Outside of the Coffee Potter in Long Valley, we stopped for a quick rest. Then we pushed on to the end of the trail at Bartley.

The same rider who took our photo before asked if he could do it again, this time for the NJ Trails website.

From High Bridge to Bartley is 15 miles of imperceptible ascent, less than a thousand feet for the entire length. The return trip descent is perceptible. 

We stopped again at the Coffee Potter. This time, some of us went in. The shop is in an old bank. They've repurposed the drive-through teller window to be a drive-through coffee window. Cars lined up all the way around the building. The line inside was almost out the door. By the time I got to the front, I no longer wanted to wait the extra two minutes for iced coffee, and left with two cookies to split with Jack later. (That's dessert for the week!) In the end, I needn't have worried about the extra two minutes. Nobody was in any hurry.

I checked the time. Jack had a 3:00 appointment for the new, bivalent Covid booster. I'd made an appointment for 4:00, just in case I didn't get home in time to drive him. I wanted to be ready to get him to the appointment, though, hoping they'd take me early so I wouldn't have to wait around at the CVS for an hour. It was hard to judge how much more biking time we had.

We set off again soon enough. A few of us got ahead. We stopped to wait at the field next to Mill Road in Middle Valley, the one with the Tewksbury hills in the distance. Today we had sunflowers.

There was this curious sign, too, an endless loop* of "No, please, after you!"

Chris and I got ahead again. In Clinton, he kept going. I waited, taking a picture of Fozzie and looking for spiders by the stream.

Together, we arrived at the bridge over the Ken Lockwood Gorge. 

I pointed down to the path and said to Bobbi, "That's where we were,"

We only had a couple of miles to go. The incline is the most obvious here. I sped back to the parking lot, not even stopping for all the gnome homes lining the trail outside of High Bridge. Cleaning off and packing Fozzie away took some time. I thanked B and M for a fun ride and headed home.

I had just enough time to shower (my legs were a dusty brown from shin to knee) and eat (no cookies, just lunch a person eats when she thinks she's fat; I'm full of contradictions) before driving two miles to the CVS that was doling out vaccines.

We'd both signed up for the booster plus the flu shot. Both were administered in the same arm, which I wasn't expecting. 

It was Moderna again. That's five Moderna shots for me. I now have enough data points to measure where I am on the post-vaccine side-effects scale. 

We sat on the couch, watching TV for a while, waiting for the stuff to kick in. Our arms were already sore. That never bothers me. I started to feel chills and a little dizzy, right on schedule.

But I'd signed up for Jim's Sunday ride, so I got up to get everything ready. It didn't take long to start feeling as if today's 30 flat miles were 60 hilly ones. Still, it was early. My plan was to ride from home and meet the group on their Boro Bean run. That way, if I felt shitty, I could turn off at any point. 

As the evening wore on, I got stiffer and stiffer. We went to sleep early. Surprisingly, I slept well, but when the alarm went off at 7:00 a.m., I could feel every part of my torso objecting. From bed, I canceled my registration and emailed Jim. He replied that this was a wise choice. I slept another hour instead. 

So far, though, as of 5:30 p.m., 26.5 hours after the shot, I'm feeling relatively okay. The first booster knocked me on my ass, with a fever too. Not this time. The flu shot tends to make me a bit soggy a few days out. Maybe that will hit tomorrow, when I go out riding with a small group of people who, like me, would rather not deal with the mayhem that is the Labor Day All-Paces Ride. For the rest of today, I'm going to continue to chill while my immune system creates antibodies for 6 different things (two Covid variants and four flu variants).

Our new glassblowing instructor has assigned us the impossible task of drawing 100 different cups. I got through the first 25 by drawing things I've made over the years. The next 25 riff on shapes we were taught as noobs. I've got a few more riff ideas, and then comes the hard part: finding cups online, as he asked us to do, and coming up with enough to fill our sketch books with 100 cups. I know what I'm doing for the rest of tonight. Ugh.

(*No, not really.)