Nate's Tour of Marietta, 2006

Nate Arnold put together an awesome long ride over in Marietta on Sunday, Nov. 5, featuring singletrack in the Wayne National forest and also right in the middle of Marietta. Even though Marietta is only an hour away, the trail features are different than around here. Super long downhills and climbs, and more rocks than we have (but still not a lot). We spent about half the day on back roads and half the day on singletrack, for a total of about 39 miles.

Thirteen of us started the ride, and we picked up one more out on the trial. However, we also lost Mike Boyes pretty early on into the ride, so still there were about 13 of us most of the time. At one point I asked Pete if Nate had found Mike yet and he said "No, but there has been a sighting." I guess that's somewhat like a sasquatch sighting. We bumped into other riders who had seen him, and we knew he was on the same trail we were, heading toward us. It was just a matter of time until we bumped back into him. He got to do a nice downhill twice because of that little snafu. Thanks to Mike for sending along the last two photos below.

Nate had left a picnic lunch and water in the woods at the half-way point, so we stopped for a snack-fest and filled up on water for the second half of the day.

We rode a nice gravel climb that bordered an illegal dump, and on our way back to Marietta we descended the same hill. Some of the guys dragged a chalkboard out of the trash and wrote "bike" on it (in case the photo below confuses you), while Jonathan Martin rolled car tires down the ravine as a warm-up before his grand finale of rolling a couch from the top of the dump to the bottom. I took a MOVIE of the couch rolling. Click here to download it (beware -- it's 8+ MB so you better have a good connection). So the Marietta trails feature the same sorts of illegal dumps we see on rides around here.

At the end of the ride there was a "water crossing," which everyone said would probably be about knee-deep and that we should take our shoes and socks of for. So I figured thigh-deep for me since I'm only 5' 2.5". Well, it turned out to be thigh deep for the guys and butt-cheeks deep for me. The water crossing turned out to be the Little Muskingum River, which was rolling a little high. The water was super cold but it felt good. It was just a little scary because it was so deep and about 2/3 of the way across the current was bumping me around a little bit. Fortunately another nice Nate from Marietta grabbed my bike from me as I was losing my balance and carried it the rest of the way across. Thanks, tall Nate in the yellow jersey!

The Marietta folks are doing an awesome job building and maintaining trails, even gaining access to parcels of land that are right in the city limits. We were able to ride through parts of the city to get to our ride starting point vs. take city streets as we headed out of and into town. It was a super day in the saddle.

Click on the thumbnails for larger photos.

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