Adventure Ride

OMR: "Let's do a ride at St. Pete's this Sunday morning."

St. Pete's

Me: "Sounds great. I'll bring the mutt"

The Commish: "Cool. I'll lead us on a nice loop. Meet at Warwick, ride all over the world, through French Creek then back to Warwick via the Horseshoe Trail."

Big Ben: "I'll start at French at the ass-crack of dawn and ride over to meet you guys."

Me - thinking my average ride distance since April is 6 miles and time 35minutes: "When did we go from a nice loop around St. Pete's to a 5 hour adventure ride?"

The Commish: "Ah Bob it's not 5 hours. You'll be fine."

Ride start - 9:30am
Ride finish - 1:30pm

He was right. It was only a 4 hour adventure, but fun none-the-less!

The Route

Note: picture is not the product of some fancy GPS gadgetry. It's simply a guess.

St. Pete's is a great raw (watch those derailleurs) place to ride. It's basically an old granite quarry, so there's plenty of rocks to ride - or fall on - sorry OMR. When you're all done with that, you jump on the Horseshoe trail and head over to French Creek and ride all the rocks over there.

Though not today. After crossing rt. 345 (border to the park), we climbed (by foot) to the top of a ridge. At the top was a nice green chain link fence with barbed wire on top.

Hmmmm.

Area 51

Conveniently there's a little trail (we rode) that runs around the perimeter of the fence - sort of. Eventually it comes to a road that goes through a gate into the fenced area. The road, though grass, is very well maintained. Now my curiosity was peaked. I started paying more attention to what was inside the fence then the rocks and trees in front me. I started seeing some heavy duty plumbing like wells and valves. At the point where we turned and headed down toward the actual park, I could see elevated sprinklers through the woods within the fence.

Sprinklers in the woods?

Reminded me of the Deer Pens at Penn State, but French Creek doesn't expirement with deer. In the picture above, you'll see a square outline around what looks like square ponds. These are the sewage ponds for the park. My guess is the park (sort of like the deer pens) is pumping the "dirty water" up the hill and spraying it in the fenced in woods to filter and purify the water as it seeps back into the water table.

Who knows?

It was a cool new place to ride, but it was late and we had to turn and ride back.

Ride all the way back.

20 miles later, we were back to Warwick and our cars.

I know 20 doesn't seem like a lot, but my average since April has been 6.

Ouch.

- b