Tuesday's Ride

Cobblestone Man:  it's not clear from the picture, but a strategically placed stone indicates that this is indeed male.  He turned up after the abandoned rail spur and the longest gas line run ever.  I'd ridden by the rail spur for years and never noticed it.  The gas line took about eight minutes, but it must be the jewel of some third party gas line maintenance company - two miles of straightaway root and rock free dirt.  Get in a groove and it's like a greased rail.

Since my competitive racing season came to a violent and costly end at Gloucester, I've been regrouping around quality rides.  Tuesday's ride was a spin down I-have-no memory lane:  Cold War ruins.  It's hard to believe that Boston was ringed with missiles sites - crazy looking weapons on launchers out in the open air:

Even stranger, I recognized a site in the Blue Hills Reservation from the Google maps satellite photo. Dirt berms surrounded the fueling area necessitating a distinctive concrete pathway for moving the missiles.  This particular facility is more intact than the site in Needham, which I live near.   The launch area feels like an abandoned parking lot.  The missile maintenance building is still standing.  The start of the concrete pathway leads right in the foreground of the photo below.

Finding a destination and then figuring out how much off-road I can squeeze into the loop is the goal.  Some spots don't turn out to be accessible; sometimes I get lost or distracted by other interesting features. This ride worked out pretty well.  See the whole thing  on Strava.

Overgrown Silo?  Nikes didn't launch from silos, this probably held rocket fuel.

Way point number two was Horse Bridge.  I'm sure there's more of a story than a $4.6 million dollar bridge primarily for horses to cross Route 24.   Strange enough to find a brief section of paved roadway and a spanking new bridge that connects to dirt trails on either side.  Unfortunately, I had to break the law to ride it.

Very honestly, I rarely ride where there's posted exclusions.  This felt like civil disobedience.  It's not clear to me why horses and bikes can't coexist.  I suspect that spots that exclude bikes in favor of horses are a byproduct of organized constituents.  In any case, the absent horses create excellent mud - the sort of stuff that turns up on race courses but no where else.  It was too straight to be really fun, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Way point number one was an abandoned rail spur.  It seems to have connected the New York, New Haven and Hartford RR to the Boston & Providence RR but is now mostly paved and completely abandoned.  I found it on Google Maps (like the Nike site).  Despite running from downtown Dedham to the high school/middle school, the initial section was too over grown to ride.  No photos, but I picked it up after the school and rode it until the Hyde Park switching yard.

Hyde Park to the gas line was passes an interesting Civil War encampment (not part of this ride).  I picked up the trail just over the Neponset.  A nearly perfectly straight shot to 95 and the semi-completed unused side of the highway interchange.  Apparently, the permanently temporary exchange between 95 and 128/93 is an artifact of Governor Sargent's decision to cancel 95's route into Boston.   Cobblestone Man can be found on the abandoned northbound on ramp.

I rode an excluded section of the Skyline Trail to avoid Royall Street. I can't imagine why bikes are not allowed on this section of trail. Bikes are probably not allowed on the Houghton Pond beaches either, but I rode there too.  The sand was too packed to be really fun, but I enjoyed it just the same.

So there was mud, sand and dirt.  The rocks kicked in between Horse Bridge and the State Police Barracks.  I pride myself on being able to thread rocky trails on fragile 32mm tires with no suspension.  This was out of hand - my hips were rocking more than Elvis and I bottomed out constantly.  At the Police Barracks/TTOR headquarters, I found a Blue Hills Reservation map and a bonus off road section.  I could cross the reservation by following yellow arrows on a trail that would challenge an "advanced mountain biker".  It was awesome and dumped me out by the Blue Hills Access Road.

I couldn't resist riding the Access Road.  A very rocky lap around the weather station and a ride down Sonya set me up for a straight shot home.