Over the (sub)continental divide

Got up Saturday morning and headed for the crest of the Alleghenies. Along the way I met Enola, late of Berkeley. She also rode out from Pittsburgh. Except she did it on a beater bike with a crate and a bag of kale, making me feel like quite the wuss for needing all this specialized gear to get my butt up the mountain.

It was nice to have some company on the trail after 10 days of riding solo!
We hit the Continental Divide around noon. My final, symbolic exit from the middle West.

And it was nice to be on a downhill slope for the first time this whole trip, as the trail wended its way down into Maryland.

The view down the mountains into Maryland:
The trail also goes through the Big Savage Tunnel, a 3000' tunnel that goes through the mountain a few miles south of the divide. Yes, a 3000' tunnel just for your bike.


From there it was an easy cruise past the Mason-Dixon line and down into Cumberland, MD.

The NPS visitors' center in Cumberland. ile zero of the Great Allegheny Passage, and mile 184.5 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal:

Fallingwater

I learned by chance that Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house was just three miles off my route. Naturally, my pedalling got interrupted for a morning to go visit. You've no doubt seen this iconic place before (in _North By Northwest_ if nowhere else).



The countryside around is pure Pennsylvania, lovely rolling forests.

The house itself is spectacular. The interiors are well preserved, and the tour guides quite good.

I really felt here, for the first time, how much Wright is a bridge between Morris and Art Nouveau and the International Style. The interior details are a streamlined, functional version of the craftsman organic aesthetic, but the structural aspects look forward to the midcentury modernism of the skyscraper: he uses a central core for utilities, and hangs a bunch of cantilevered reinforced concrete platforms and terraces around it as the main spaces of the house. Very cool to see.

Mile 500

A nice birthday present to myself.

The Great Allegheny Passage

I just spent a week riding through the woods from Pittsburgh to DC (where I'm very happily caffeinating at the moment on coffee from Tryst on 18th Street). It's an amazing ride through beautiful forests, totally car-free for over 300 miles. The first leg is the Great Allegheny Passage, 123 miles from McKeesport, PA to Cumberland, MD. It's on an old railroad grade, about a 1% grade as you go east - so gentle you barely notice it. It follows the Youghiogeny River (or 'the Yock' as Dr. Goff kindly informed me). Surface good, forest beautiful, lots of campsites:

Because it's a railroad grade, there are big bridges and viaducts to ride over, just for hikers and cyclists. Having infrastructure like this, just for bikes, feels like some combination of Christmas, Mardi Gras, and the Fourth of July.


Seriously, that bridge is just for you to ride your bike over.

A rare photo of me, snapped by a friendly utility worker I met as the trail passes through West Newton.
Apparently George Washington ambushed and killed a bunch of French scouts around here in 1754, helping to start the French and Indian war.

Point of Beginning

This was an unexpected but thrilling find, along the Ohio River at the OH/PA border: the point of beginning of the original township/range system devised by Thomas Jefferson for surveying (and settling) the frontier and the west.

The marker. For some reason it is erected 1,050 feet from the original survey point, right at the state line.

This system is why the American landscape from Ohio to the Rockies is rectilinear, with a north-south or east-west road every mile for a thousand miles or more. Creating an all-encompassing system for dividing land made it much easier for the government to establish governmental boundaries and sell land to white settlers headed for the frontier. Though based on the Roman example, the Jeffersonian system is the largest land division system ever enacted, and has profoundly shaped the way American communities function and the way American people relate to the landscape.

Pittsburgh: A Cycling Hell

I like Pittsburgh, don't get me wrong. But I've been amazed on this trip how much a city's accessibility by bike can either warm the heart or create a vast pool of blind hatred. Pittsburgh, unfortunately, is the latter, requiring miles and miles of riding in heavy traffic, or over super steep hills, or both, to get into the fair city.

Welcome to Pennsylvania!

I rode over the hill through some pretty country, but came down to SR 51, which follows the Ohio River into the city. Now, this route is signposted as a 'State Bicycle Route', as you can see above. I'm not sure what genius thought this up, but 51 is engineered as a 4-lane divided highway, complete with rumble strips on the edge. Apparently 'bike-friendly' in this state means 'enjoy riding on the glass and debris-strewn shoulder for 25 miles while the 18-wheelers roll by at 60 mph'.

Amusingly, there are stretches where this road has a posted 35 mph limit, despite being clearly designed for 55 mph+. Note to highway engineers: if you build it, they will speed.

The kicker? 51, still marked as a bike route, merges into an interstate highway bridge with no obvious way of getting your bike off except riding across four lanes of traffic to the opposite sidewalk.

For all that, the approach to the city is beautiful:

To top it all off, I got a flat just a mile and a half from my destination in Shadyside. Harrumph. But it's always really wonderful to see Ashley, who's great company and has fine taste in breakfast joints besides!


Thanks, Ashley!

Scenes from Eastern Ohio

Eastern Ohio (though a bit hilly) is great country for cycling. Some snapshots:

Above: Zoar Village, a former utopian Christian communist settlement.


I feel slightly guilty putting this one up, but not enough to resist:

Mile 400

Pulling out of Mechanicsville.

Storms over Mechanicsville

The night of the 15th found me in Mechanicsville, OH, with the last fingers of Hurricane Ike speeding across the sky. I stopped a guy on a rider mower to ask him for some water, and ended up getting offered a place to stay for the night - Fred, as it turned out, was the assistant chief of the local fire department as well as a fount of knowledge about the township and its history.


It was a stroke of luck, because the wind was picking up and threatened to turn violent as it started getting dark. Fred met me at the fire house and called Glenn, the chief, to get the OK for me to crash in the conference room. A half hour later, the winds were whipping around 60 mph and the calls started coming in from the dispatcher. Volunteers raced up in their pickups, suited up, and rolled out in the fire trucks to deal with downed trees, downed power lines, and fires from the combination of the two. The power went off in the station itself not long after that. It was a blessing to be inside that night - I don't think my tent would have survived long outside.


Chief Glenn, ready to roll out.


Many thanks to the guys (and at least one gal) of the Mechanicsville VFD for their hospitality. Stop on through if you're ever in the area.

Mile 300

Mile 300: Lonesome Lock, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. September 14, 2pm. 

The Bolivarians of Ohio

These days, the closest you get to Bolivarianism in Ohio is probably buying gas at Citgo, owned by Petroleos de Venezuela SA - that is, the country's 'Bolivarian' revolutionary government. The place names of central Ohio, however, are littered with references to the man, from Bolivar Avenue in Cleveland, to a bunch of roads spread across several counties, to a little town named Bolivar down near the interstate (which the local bike shop owner assures me will soon have the only canal towpath trailhead within a mile of an interstate). 

The great thing is that all these places are pronounced to rhyme with 'Oliver', following the delightful midwestern logic of inventing bizarre pronunciations for European names (think of the several 'Milans', for instance, pronounced 'my-lun'). 

My historian's guess is that Bolivar's popularity in Ohio came from the fact that this part of the state was settled by whites in the mid-1820s, just after the revolutions that freed latin America from Spanish rule. Maybe they saw in Simón Bolivar the freedom-loving frontiersman they thought themselves to be; an Andrew Jackson del sur, quisás? I suspect that this was the first, and probably last, latin American revolutionary movement that was widely popular in Ohio.   

Cycling infrstructure... in Cleveland?

Now I was something of a blank slate when it came to Cleveland. I guess I imagined it as something like a smaller version of Detroit, and an equally car-dominated city. Wrong on both counts as it turns out. At least for those travelling from east to west, the city has a great cycling route that stretches at least 10 miles along the lakefront. A few photos:

At the western city limits
The bridge into downtown.
A strange white building between Browns Stadium and the R&R Hall of Fame.
Just past the end of North Marginal Drive.

It's a sweet ride, especially near sunset with the light all golden. You cruise through the western neighborhoods, through a giant park along the water, up through Ohio City, over into downtown, and then past the stadiums onto North Marginal drive, which goes between the freeway and a tiny airport. Around E 60th you start getting exits, just like the cars do! I took the MLK Boulevard underpass, which connects to another nice sidewalk trail up to the Case Western Reserve campus.

The Cleveland Lakefront Bikeway actually changed my views on bike routes. The genius thing about it is that it's only about 25% off-road. But the on-road parts don't have agressive traffic. The key thing is extremely aggressive signage, to the point of having two in one block sometimes. The signs are large, well-placed, and easy to spot: so even when the route meanders through some residential streets in Ohio City and looks like it's going nowhere, you're confident that you're not lost. I hadn't really thought so hard about the signage issue before, but I've become something of a convert.

Detroit to Cleveland: 230 miles, 3 days

Either I can't count, or something is wrong with my maps. I made it to Cleveland after 81, 76, and 71-mile days of riding, which was a lot more than I really wanted to do. I'm amazed how three long days like this leaves you not only sore but kind of cranky. But it was a beautiful ride through three picture-perfect late summer days.

Pace Brendan's comment below, Detroit is getting a little more bike-friendly. Behold: the Dequindre Cut bike 'path', more like a highway.

The Dequindre Cut was famous in its many abandoned years as a gallery for some of the best graf pieces in the city. They've made the decision to leave them, mostly. It's a great ride, about 2 miles from Eastern Market down to the water near the Atwater Brewery. Not technically open yet, but the construction guys were literally pouring the last 3 feet of concrete as I rode by.

Southwest Detroit: Trucks and giant industrial things. Cycling hell but pretty in a Blade Runner kind of way.

Downriver is a mysterious area. You have little towns like Wyandotte here, with thought-provoking special offers, followed by cornfields studded with industrial plants that look like they might be closed, but then maybe not. Sort of metaphorical for Michigan's economy, I guess.

The above is in Trenton, a crossroads on the landward side of Grosse Isle. South of here is really country, with some nice parks/wildlife refuges. I rode out and took a break at the mouth of Lake Erie:

If you look to the right, however, you see the stacks of the Fermi 2 nuke plant. South of here, it was cornfields pretty much to the state line. Stopped in Monroe, a cute but somewhat forlorn town. George Armstrong Custer's wife was from there, apparently. That, and a nearby battle with the Canadians in the war of 1812, seem to have been the high points of civic life. The guys at the local bike shop were great, and let me stash my ride while I consumed a gigantic grinder. 

The state line is also the Toledo limit, and the farms abruptly transition into suburbs - sort of an urban growth boundary.

I finally made it, 80 weary miles later and just shy of sunset, to Maumee Bay state park, about 10 miles east of Toledo. 

I want to get out and spend a little time loafing around Cleveland, so the rest gets short shrift. 

Wednesday was an overly long cruise through empty, quiet cornfields, into the wind and slightly uphill the whole way. So quiet that I couldn't find anywhere to get food for 40 miles. Four small towns and no gas stations, diners, restaurants, nothing. (Except feed stores, perhaps.) But beautiful:

 

Thursday: 70 miles along the Lake Erie shore, through quiet beach towns and suburbs. US 6 is actually a nice cycling road! (Though as soon as you hit the Cuyahoga County line, the pavement gets all crappy.) Only major challenge was the drawbridge being up in Lorain, and an unpleasant 3 mile detour to the south.

Surprisingly, I felt stronger as the afternoon wore on, and made it to Len and Dottie's place in University Heights late but not that late. It is a cruel thing, however, for the last 5 miles of the day to be uphill.

I'm leaving you for now with just a glimpse of Cleveland. I have a whole raft of praises to sing for its waterfront bike path, but I'll leave that for next time!

Getting to Detroit

If I had known how easy it would be to ride into Detroit, I would have done it long ago. Driving there from Ann Arbor is 40 miles of freeway, or mile after mile of suburban subdivisions in places like Livonia and Romulus. As it turns out, you can get as far as Dearborn on quiet green roads without stoplights or traffic to fight. I took Plymouth Road to Plymouth, where there were carnival rides set up right in the downtown streets, with little spinning ride cars suddenly zipping over the rooftops. Then to Hines Drive, which follows the Rouge River for another 18 miles or so the UM Dearborn campus. The green winding drive was a strange alternate reality: you pass all the familiar roads like Middle Belt and Outer Drive (which a few miles south are dire industrial strips near the airport), but here you're surrounded by trees and water and families chilling out in the park.

The last 7 or 8 miles I rode Michigan Avenue, with the lowering sun painting the ruined buildings gold as a cruised into town. Ate barbecue at Slow's with Dave, and slept well.  

Introducing...

...my bike. We're going to spend a lot of time together in the next few weeks.

For you bike geeks out there: it's a Surly Cross-Check 54cm frame with Alex rims, 105 aero levers, 8-spd XT derailleurs, an ultegra 43/53 crankset, 12-34 sram cassette, some kind of generic SPD pedals, and dura-ace bar-end shifters. Oh, and a Brooks saddle, in which I have become a serious believer.

The panniers are Arkel Sakaroos, made with generous helpings of Canadian pride. I actually managed to fit everything, including a campstove, tent, sleeping bag, pad, and 4 days of food, into these things. They apparently kick ass.

Photographed just off of Hines Drive, near Warren Ave, in suburban Detroit.

Tour de Rust Belt Begins Sunday

My long-threatened bicycle trip to the east coast is beginning Sunday. I'm riding my Surly Cross-check from Ann Arbor, MI to Washington, DC; then north to Hartford, CT.
I'll be going solo, partly camping and partly crashing with friends in big cities. Here's the route:


The first part is definitely a tour of the rust belt: Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Pittsburgh. The tiny urban planner that lives inside me is pretty stoked to spend some time traversing these places. The cyclist in me has a little more trepidation.

I'm leaving for Detroit on Sunday the 7th and plan to arrive in Connecticut around October 3. Some photos of my iron steed will follow soon, for those of you that geek out on such things. You know who you are.

Some more details on the first part of my route:

The Ann Arbor-Detroit-Toledo leg is all road. I'm using the Adventure Cycling Association's Northern Tier Route from Fremont, OH to Cleveland. From Cleveland to Canton, OH I'm taking the Ohio and Erie Canalway, part of which goes through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. From south of Akron I'm cutting across hilly country to Pittsburgh, PA, then picking up the Cumberland and Pittsburgh Trail, a 160-mile bike path that follows the Youghiogeny River down to Cumberland, MD. At Cumberland I'll pick up the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath, which follows the Potomac all the way to Georgetown.