The sap is running. Welcome to maple syrup season in Vermont.
Lotsa riding this weekend, George’s Aunt took K overnight which meant a nice open schedule. Saturday I went out and climbed some local hills. That’s where I saw these sap buckets. This is the old fashioned way to collect the sap and generally smaller operations will still throw these up on a few trees for the family syrup production. Larger operations run plastic tubing through the sugarbush. I saw both this weekend, but not sure that the sap runs well when it’s overcast as no one was really boiling when I rode by.
Sunday George called for an exploration ride, and explore is what we did. You can see all the details over on the Bike29 blog, as well as his Garmin info. Basically, we took the cross bikes out for a dirt road, two-gap, mud season epic. And it was awesome.
Here I am, cresting Moretown Gap (thanks DA for the photos). The weather forecast was a bit iffy, but since the temps were in the high 40′s at the house and a 60% chance of rain is a 40% chance of not raining, we hardened up and went out. The first half went well. Moretown Gap is a 2 mile, nice even grade with some steeper sections thrown in, this climb is going on my list for Fool’s Gold prep.
The first half of the ride was one of those incredible, “i can’t believe we’ve never ridden this before” sort of rides. Out in the middle of the woods on a singletrack dirt road. We were having a good time. But then I started to feel the after effects of the hills I rode the day earlier – read no power. Add that to the soft conditions of the road and some rather aggressive gearing on my cross bike and I was hurting. More precisely, my legs were hurting.
By the time we hit the Roxbury Gap climb it was cold, raining, and snowing at the top. Roxbury Gap is an unrelenting, steep climb. This was the worst we’d seen the mud, and it was sucking me in. Thank goodness that I had an extra layer and my snowboard gloves for the descent, because by the time we were rolling toward Waitsfield it was pouring rain. At this point I wasn’t really having any fun.
We opted out of the dirt road return and jumped on 100 for some faster pavement and dodged speeding traffic as fast as we could. It was an awesome day out on the bike, such a treat that George and I could actually get out together and I can’t wait to do this ride in dry conditions.
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