Various pics from Hess Army, Egg, A Duie Pyle, the Rik, Ryan H, MJ, Matt O, Kidder
Nine riders, same place, same time, started and finished together, and it wasn’t a race.
The downs were worth the ups. It actually seemed like the payoffs were longer than what we earned with the climbs.
Couldn’t have asked for a better crew.
Rene ruled the day.
Egg plucked all the low hanging plumbs.
The beginning of the heinous climb out of Glenmont.
We thought we had avoided the Killbuck Creek flooding, but near mile 35, things got moist.
That truck turned around
One of the best rides in a long time! Kudos to whoever made that route. Big time climbs throughout, high speed descents, just enough pavement, one last ball buster at the end, and a high speed rail to finish it off.
Now that I have all my late-winter smug bitchiness out of my system, here’s something nice: The Aberration
“Aberration” is not necessarily a positively connoted word. But it is the name some egg gave my old Raleigh XXIX (maybe he was referring to me?). And things need names.
It’s the bike I’m most interested in riding at this point in late winter, when everybody just wants to get out, when it’s too cold for fast road riding and too muddy for trails.
It’s, dare I say, just right for gravel** (see note below).
It started off like this:
2007, singlespeed, steel frame, 29 inch wheels at the beginning of the 29er revolution
Then it started turning into something else:
Notice the carbon fork and mismatched wheelset (which was fine with me, but horrified my friends). Not sure what happened to the PBR waterbottle or my svelte figure and matching shoulders.
Then the frame cracked, but it got warrantied quickly. Unfortunately, the replacement came in robin’s egg blue, which I got painted a manly UPS brown. It sat for awhile watching as I acquired these:
Trek 69er (Trek’s early stab at a mullet)
Scott Scale (shoulda kept it)
Trek Stache (kept it)
Knolly Warden (really shoulda kept it)
Santa Cruz Hightower (spent more $ than I ever thought I would on a bike)
Chromag Rootdown (now that the fork has been serviced, it rides like it was designed to)
Vitus road bike (yes. a road bike. and yes, I wear lycra tights. go screw yourself. just don’t hit me)
Then I looked at the Aberration one day a couple of years ago, and the wheels started turning, Gears and new handlebars and shazam!! A new bike!
Now it is a droopy bar, cranky old fuck, like me.
I can take it just about anywhere, and it’s the oldest bike I own.
It’s got:
Vittoria Mezcal 2.3 tires, which are quickly becoming cliche according to the COGnoscenti.
WTB wheelset, probably too narrow for the tires but they’ve been working fine so far!
Recently handed-down rigid aluminum fork (who even rides an aluminum fork? Hey, it was free!) that replaced a 10+ year old, never-serviced RockShox suspension fork
Handlebar pads made out of slices of 1/4 inch sleeping pad. No need for suspension now!!
Revelate frame bag which holds all the Athletic Brewing I could possibly need for a ride (how about a sponsorship, Athletic Brewing? Maybe just a discount? Sobriety aint cheap!)
Old, rusty, serviceable brake rotor
The Aberration in a slightly older iteration:
Seized Thomsen seatpost, which remains seized
SRAM Apex doubletap drivetrain (I think)
Crappy old saddle
Crappy old SPD pedals recently upgraded to these with my REI dividends, cause I’m bougie and just don’t care
40mm Ramblers on which I ate shit
Truvativ Crankset, which if you look closely, is the only remaining part in this ghost of a machine
Now that I’m done virtue signaling, what’s the takeaway? Well…
Everybody has an old frame hanging on the wall, and some people are resurrecting them. I’m part of that stereotype, bro. And it’s ok. You’re ok. We’re all ok.
It would just be nice if I had some gravel to ride on.
**Sometimes my friends and I are forced to “explore” the gravel roads and paths of Hinckley and the Cuyahoga Valley since it’s illegal to ride anywhere besides pavement in most of our parks.
In Michigan it takes about five minutes to find gravel roads, but in uptight Ohio you’ll get a ticket or worse for venturing off designated mountain bike trails or pavement.
So if you see me or my friends rambling on a “exploratory ride,” please aim high and trust that we’ll be gone without a trace.
LIKE YOU, I’ve been trying to take advantage of this oddly warm February weather. And maybe like you, not only have I’ve been feeling that typical mid-winter lack of motivation, but I’m also…I’ll just say it out loud…REALLY BORED with the typical places and routes I’ve ridden over the last few years.
ARE WE MEN OR MICE? So after a well-made plan to do a Cleveland urban assault fell apart as quickly as it came together, I jumped at the chance when Egg, the Ride Incubator, hatched an idea to join Mike J. for a ride from his house near New Franklin, west of the Akron/Canton metroplex. (More on Mike later – he’s a real deal OG whose Wanted poster once allegedly appeared on the CVNP Rangers office wall.) Mike dropped from the scene for quite a while but recently, he’s been getting back into riding and he does some cool stuff down by Portage Lakes.
The “new” in New Franklin sounded like the perfect antidote to the burnout crouching on my horizon.
I self-rescued from this unusual spillway at Nimisila Reservoir
A BUNCH OF TOOLS: Mike J led me, The Rik, and Egg on a tour of the upper Tuscarawas River Valley then the Nimisila Reservoir and Portage Lakes Area. Nimisila Reservoir: very cool, bald eagles and ospreys and such. A new-to-me oasis. It was nice to tool around Portage Lakes, drink a beer and shoot the shit. Reminded me of cruising around the suburban lakes of SE Michigan.
DEUS EX MACHINA: the exact same doggy brush that my wife uses on our dogs. Wot are the odds? So The Rik decided to use it on Egg. It was a happy grooming.
Thirty five miles and 1600 feet of climbing felt just right on a sunny 50 degree day in February.
SO THE NEXT DAY, after seeing the brutski gravel route Paul M. and Matt O. did in the hills of north central Ohio, I decided it was time for a good ol’ solo ride with navigation. I converted their 50 mile, 5000 ft route into a shorter 30 mile 3500 ft. route starting in Killbuck. Peaceful, quiet, meditative climbing (the climb out of Glenmont is particularly ball-busting). But the Stache’s meaty beaty big and bouncy 2.8 Rekon up front left me picking bugs out of my teeth on the hairball “technical gravel” descents.
SPEAKING OF NEW: The recently installed PNW Rainier Gen3 dropper passed the testwinningly.
THREE THOUGHTS:
#1 I would have ridden my “gravel bike” (which is really no more than my original 29er circa 2005 made new by converting it to drop bars) but alas, it is sadly, embarrassingly, and unfashionably devoid of this: Coast Suspension. Probably my next purchase — if I can get the seat post unseized.
#2: Once my headphones took a shit around mile 10, and I could no longer listen to turn-by-turn directions from Ridewith GPS, I was left to stop at most intersections and check the route visually on my phone (which I do not have mounted to my handlebars). For years, I have resisted plopping down $300 for a Garmin, a tool I thought I would only use on infrequent rides such as this. But with retirement and more rides such as this also crouching on the horizon, the lure of Lezyne’s well-reviewed cycling gps unit is becoming tastier and tastier.
#3: Dude blows by me on a dirt bike at about mile 20. He looks like he’s having fun. Honestly, I am too. But so does Jeff Jones in this video posted recently on BikeSnobNYC:
Not only is Jones on a 29+, but the video is from 2021, and the motor on his prototype is removable – worthy of a Zwift thumbs-up flurry. QUESTION: How much more fun would I have had with a little kick in the pants on some of those climbs?? The jury in my mind is closer and closer to rendering a verdict.
EXCEPT…with its mud pits and goo, an ebike wouldn’t have helped in this ^^ particular section of the route. (note the cool 29+ bike). All in all, the Killbuck/Glenmont area is a nice new alternative to the typical gravel routes out of Mohican.
A FINAL NOTE: I’m up to a whopping 2 subscribers! And just surpassed 1000 views! Although I have been accused of being an Influencer, I assure you I’m just doing this for fun. Nevertheless, thanks to Bill M. and my lovely wife for allegedly reading this thing. I’m seriously thinking, though, about pinching off the monthly fee to try to get rid of the ads for dick pills and belly fat cures.
Travels with Pops 