Mulberry Creek 41mile Monsoon. For some reason, we decided to roll the Mulberry Creek Beach Party today, even though a lot of folks who planned to show made the right decision after checking the weather. Each time I checked Epic Ride Weather, it was getting more and more likely that it was going to rain which proved correct as it started raining 30 minutes before the ride. Me, Merrill, Rox, Greg and Nate sat under the church awning looking at the weather, along with Robert who probably made the right call not to roll and realized that our route was going into the oncoming storms.
As soon as I saw that, I said this is really a bad idea. Me, Greg, Merrill and Rox debated for a little while, and then Nate said, “I came out here to ride”. I told the rest of them if Nate was rolling, I was rolling with him. That did it. Hard friends made bad decisions.
Having ridden this route last week after two weeks of no rain, I have seen it in extremely different conditions, both of which made it very difficult. When bone dry, there is a lot of sand that will make your tires feel flat. When it is, or has rained recently, the red clay from mile 16 to 25 is way too soft to ride. But we did anyway. We saw it, and I tried it, and it was deep. I pulled back to the group and we started debating reroutes, and then we were like where did Nate go? Merrill rode out on the soft stuff and saw him ahead on the route.
We asked is he riding or walking? and at first, he was walking, and then Merrill said he was riding. Greg got on his bike and started riding, and I was like, really? I knew that the Perry mtn climb was coming up after the creek and was worried about what that surface would be like. But we kept rolling.
The first half of that stretch was ridiculous. I managed to ride the first mile or two, until the red clay was caked into every crevice of my bike. After four miles in I caught up to Rox, as my chain kept getting forced off the chainring by the mud. She was stopped for the same reason. It took a lot of mud clearing to get back riding. The rain had let up at that point, and the road started drying quickly, then we found a big puddle to stop and clean most of the mud off the bikes.
We finally made it to the store at mi25, and then stopped at the creek and had snacks and washed away a ton of mud. It was interesting to note that the creek level was the exact same as the week before, even with a morning of rain. But the roads made it look like it might not have even rained there at the most southern point of the route.
I was not looking forward to climbing Perry Mountain afterward. We got rolling, and once I saw the loose gravel kicker at the bottom of the climb at mile 32 I called in an extraction. I was done. The heat was awful. That mud had sucked up way too much energy to mess with that climb. I saw Nate walking that climb as I rolled up and yelled ahead that I was out. I’m not sure what he said, but imagined it was the same as the call to ride in the first place, he just came out to ride. I dealt with the horse flies for a minute looking for a shady spot and said screw this. I cancelled the extraction and walked up Perry Mountain.
I felt a lot better in the last stretches, but I knew that I spent a lot more than I brought before I got back to the church. Huge thanks to Nate for having the courage to see what would happen. It wasn’t all good, but it was great. Thank God for hard friends who make bad choices.