2008 Tuesday Night Ride - June 10, 2008 -- Birch Hill

By Tom Clark

Hiya.
This was our Birch Hill ride, my least favorite ride of the season, next to the Two Rivers ski trails ride. I'm not all that enthralled with riding on smoothly sculpted trails that never actually go anywhere. I'm not knocking them for skiing -- that'd be silly. They just don't lend themselves to having epic adventures.

For being such a nice night, there was very low turnout. All told, there were nine of us at the start, and we finished with fewer than that.

We did the bump park or whatever it is called, with the series of dirt humps. It's easy to catch air off them, particularly the last one when you aren't worried about slamming into the next one. Then, down Black Cross and up Russels Revenge. Near the top of RR, Eric Troyer led us down a very tricky foot-trail that dumps out on one of the subdivision roads (Kniffen?) behind the Fairhill church. We followed another trail back up to the bottom of Russels Revenge, and rode up that again. There was considerable grumbling, but it was mostly for grumblings sake. Everyone there got to the top in short order.

Coming down Tower, Eric led us off on another unofficial trail that was nicely technical, a welcome change from the groomed trails. It connected to White Bear, right near the shooting range. Some ways down the trail after that, we took one of those four-wheeler trails down the hill, down to where it started to get wet. We followed another four-wheeler trail that looped back up the hill and paralleled White Bear. We'd lost Tom Moyer some way back and after a while we decided it would be good to see if we could find his corpse.

We reconnected with lower White Bear and rode back towards the stadium. At the four-wheeler trail that we had taken downhill, we found a bloody-looking sign that said "TOM" and had bloody arrows pointing back towards the stadium. Although there were a couple of used paintballs on the sign that could probably account for the red coloring, we fancied that something, probably a lynx, had torn his 'nads off, and he wrote the note in his own blood, leaving his nads (the paintballs) there as some kind of warning.

Feeling that Tom was either rotting in the bushes or well on his way home, we kept going down the trail and got back to the shooting range. We played around in the range, pedaling fast and trying to catch air past the posts. Will did pretty well, and I almost joined Moyer in 'nad removal a couple of times when my left cleat popped out of the pedal in mid air. New cleat time, I think.

Back at the stadium we did a couple of passes down the Roller Coaster and then called it a day. All in all a fun sorta ride, thanks to Eric Troyers additions. Still, it's pretty short and a candidate for removal from the Tuesday Ride list, in my opinion.