Greetings and welcome!
My Christmas ride was a good one. I found some spectacular conditions and some pretty minimal ones.
It seemed like the trails got thinner south and west on the 1-2 trail. Tight woods trails were thin, open forest roads were great. There were some terrain features where there were big ruts in the road before it froze, or big rocky hills, and 9-11″ of snow isn’t going to fill that in. Plowed roads had some ice, but not enough. I left some steel out there yesterday. Un-plowed roads and a lot of the more open trails were really nice.
The recent weather has been very favorable for the trail base. The groomed areas were frozen in pretty hard and are be nice and durable. That is happy news considering that we have pretty minimal frost in the ground. It really is all that you could possibly ask for out of 9-11″ of snow, and more. It is still less than a foot, so it comes with some warts.
The clear and pleasant weather has also brought cold nights. It was down to 4ยบ last night and it is +2F at about midnight. That will help with the lakes and the trails, and we could use it, especially for making ice on the lakes. The lakes that I passed today were pretty much void of tracks, and with good reason. That is turning around, give it a little time.
I promised a weather report. For the most part it looks like more of the same nice clear average weather for at least a week. There is a minor disturbance for Friday night into Saturday that could bring light snow. Hopefully it gets carried away and goes 1-3.
After that we are looking at more nice weather until about next Wednesday, when a weak clipper is being shown passing through. The following Saturday brings another clipper and hopefully more active weather.
For now we have a big dome of high pressure camped over the center of North America, and it is pushing our storms south. The weather here in the middle of it is pleasant with sunny mid-20s days and cool clear nights. That would be a total delight if we had another storm or two under our belts to build the trails up a little.
I have a million and one things to do today, but I am going to do my best to get some saddle time in. The next mission I think will be north and maybe a little east and see how things look that way. I had a good time on my ride.
The day was not without challenges. The trail camera came up stone dead so I ended up riding with a really expensive DSLR. I didn’t like that much. The other one was a ~$30 E-Bay special, so no loss.
That problem was already solved when I picked up a couple year old good working camera and and two sets of high capacity batteries, again on E-Bay, for a grand total of $21. I don’t need a lot of megapixels for web pictures, and point and shoot digital cameras depreciate fast. It was a nice camera in its day, and now it it my disposable for trail pix and taking along in the truck or to work.
The other thing that popped up is a minor chatter when I let off of the throttle fast. It kind of sounds like the secondary chattering on the backshift. It wasn’t a big deal, but that will get looked at tomorrow and is likely an easy fix.
Beyond that the little Indy Trail ran pretty good. It rode decent and while it didn’t have the triple pull, it did pretty good.
That’s news for now. Have a good Wednesday and thank you for visiting!
RJB