Industry Figure Tom Chappell

The plan:

I’m repeating the 100-kilometer long, 5,000-foot ascent Mt. Wilson ride, with new riding partners this time — Ron is temporarily out of the running, recovering from minor surgery, so I’m riding with a couple of other guys from Alcatel-Lucent, who I’ve never ridden with before.

Both are almost certainly younger than I am, and both are serious grown-up cyclists: Vincent Magret, who rode from San Francisco down to Los Angeles last year, 80 miles a day, sometimes 125 miles a day, and Carlos Navarrette, his regular riding partner, including for that same SF-to-LA ride. Are they going to be faster than I am?

Yes.

But they’re game to ride with me, and I with them, so off we go!

My goal: to do the ride slightly faster than last time, for some positive value of “slightly”.

What actually happened:

Did you see the series finale of Gilmore Girls last year? It started kind of normally, but every so often, in the background, another truck would pass by loaded with hay bales. And then the characters would talk among themselves a little more, and the plot would progress, and…there’s another hay bale truck, that’s kind of odd, and maybe the characters have come inside now, but you can see the occasional hay bale truck passing by through the window. And then more normal show development, and…okay, what’s with all the hay bale trucks?

Our ride was exactly like that, except with fire trucks, and gale-force winds.

I had mentioned to Mom the day before that we would be doing the Mt. Wilson ride again, and she said, “Ooh, I hope you don’t get blown off the mountain, what with the Santa Anas blowing so hard.” Mom lives in Indiana, but that doesn’t stop her from knowing the weather on random weekends in Southern California.

Then, on the morning of the ride, Carlos called me up to say that trees were blown over in his area. Plus, the weather forecast was 25-28mph winds, which seemed…windy. We mused over that a while, and I walked outside, and it wasn’t that windy; there were periods of actual calm, too. Weird. So we thought about it, and I said, well, we can reschedule; or, we can start out and see how it is in the mountains, and just turn back if we don’t like it; or, if we get further into the ride and it gets bad later, there are ways of cutting the ride short and still having a nice ride in civilization. Everybody was game to try to have some kind of a bike ride.

We got going by 8:30am, slipped over the Mt. Gleason pass down into the Tujunga Wash, and started the more-or-less steady climb that makes up the first hour of the ride. And the thing is (and this will really surprise you), it was windy. About 30 minutes into the ride, before we’d even gone over the first bridge crossing the Tujunga Wash, and with Vincent in the lead, I told Carlos that geez, my heart rate on the monitor was already up to 85% of capacity, about 10 or 20 beats per minute higher than usual for this stretch. Carlos turned to me in kind of an alarmed way, and said (paraphrasing now), “No, no…don’t try to keep up with Vincent, that’s a bad mistake. When the hills get steep, he just goes faster.” So, I backed off to 80%, a little more appropriate for a stretch of road that wasn’t even supposed to be the hard part yet.

And we plugged along, and sometimes the mountains blocked us from the wind, and that was great. We crossed the second bridge and started the climb up past the dam, and the wind was…well, it was pretty bad, but it still seemed like we might have a chance.

I met up with Vincent and Carlos at the dam overlook, and we got some photos (click to enlarge):

Vincent and Carlos, at the Big Tujunga Dam overlook.

Then we headed off up the next leg to the first T-crossing. And the wind…was indescribably bad, especially when going through cutouts that had been blasted into the mountain, creating a channel that they could lay a road through. In those things, the wind was hard enough to sting, especially with the clouds of grit that it was carrying along. Okay, here’s one way to describe it. Up until that morning, I would have been able to say, perfectly truthfully, that in 28 years of cycling in the modern era, I’d never once gotten off the bike and walked. I can’t say that any more — I was afraid that I was going to be blown down and not be able to unclip in time. So I walked 100 feet out one of the worst of the wind channels. I heard later that some parts of L.A. had winds in excess of 100mph, and I can believe it.

We regrouped at the first T-crossing, marveled at the ferocity of the wind, and wondered what to do. And it was here that I told the guys a little excerpt from an earlier ride, also started with great ambition, which had gone Horribly Awry:

My friend Chris Gibson likes to read Aviation Safety magazine. He tells me that one thing that they’ve noticed is that small planes with two pilots in them (with one as the passenger) crash much more often than small planes with a single pilot, and the reason is this: where one pilot might be frightened of some oncoming weather and turn back, in a plane with two pilots, neither one wants to admit to the other that he isn’t game to go ahead.

“…and so, ” I concluded, “…with that in mind, I’d just like to say that if anyone doesn’t want to go up to Mt. Wilson just today, I’m totally on board!”

At this point, we could have just turned around, a 30-mile ride. Or, we could have turned left, bridge, tunnel, Hidden Springs Cafe, and planned on not going up Mt. Wilson road, but still secretly having that as an option if everything calmed down, about a 55-mile ride. But a significant portion of that ride would be heading virtually straight into the wind, up some evil grades. Or, we could just adapt to the conditions, and turn right, and do the 55-mile Sunland/Rose Bowl loop featuring the Angeles Crest, Descanso Gardens, a Victory Lap around the Rose Bowl, back out through Montrose, down La Tuna Canyon, up the short evil uphill in Shadow Hills, and home.

So, that’s we did, and as we were headed up Angeles Forest Hwy., a fire truck passed us going hell-for-leather in the opposite direction, sirens blazing. Then again, on Angeles Crest Hwy., more fire and rescue trucks. Huh.

A view of the Big Tujunga Reservoir from Angeles Forest Highway.

Carlos and Vincent, at the Angeles Crest Highway (which can be seen winding down from the pass).

I got another flat on Angeles Crest, the second one in two weeks straight, after no flats for a long, long time. But I had hit a stone pretty hard, and the tube just popped. I had bought a little one-use CO2 canister to re-inflate the tire, which I’d never tried before, and it was awesome. This was the threaded kind, which you screw all the way in to the adapter, push on to the valve, and then slightly unscrew to allow gas to flow. Worked great.

Back in civilization, we headed over towards the Rose Bowl, and virtually immediately were beset by fire trucks. Then my brother-in-law Steve called to inquire after my health, because there were fires all over Southern California, from the insane wind and near-total lack of rain this last year, just over 3 inches in the entire year running from July to June). Pepperdine University had been evacuated. I reassured Steve that we didn’t live anywhere near there, though my work was kind of near there. I told the guys about the fires, and they looked a little concerned; it turned out that they lived in Oak Park, right next to work, and near enough to the fires to make someone look concerned.

After the Victory Lap, and a sighting of the Mt. Wilson summit, from below this time, along with an oath that we would make it ours one day, we started back. The guys both had GPS units, and took off ahead, to meet at Descanso Gardens. Vincent managed to get far enough ahead that Carlos missed seeing him take a turnoff, and Carlos ended up in the wilds of La Cañada, surrounded by dogs, though most of those dogs were behind fences. But we had cell phones, and I more or less knew the area, so we were fairly quickly all reunited.

We stopped in at Descanso Gardens, where they very nicely just waved us in to refill on water and use the restrooms.

We headed out Honolulu up to La Tuna Canyon, and I was again struck by how much easier this route was becoming for me. Just an easy 55 miles, in mountains.

As we approached Shadow Hills, we got our first unobstructed view of the horizon, and it was…horrible. An entire arc of the horizon, as far as the eye could see, was a mass of black smoke. It turned out that a fire had started on one of the ridges, and the wind had blown the fire along the top of the ridge into a 15-mile fire line in just no time. And that was just one of the dozen or even quinzaine (”about 15″) fires in the area. Just one of them, and it dominated the horizon, from 20 miles away.

As we headed through Shadow Hills, I warned the guys that there was one more short, evil uphill near the end (as is in the best tradition of centuries and half-centuries). They weren’t impressed by my words, because they are actual grown-up cyclists, but I did hear a soft gasp of awe as they turned the corner, and the hill was revealed, climbing up to — who knew where? — the actual top of the hill was hidden from initial view by the closer canopy of trees, as it climbed up, apparently to Jesus.

The wind had been laying low during much of our romp through civilization, but was thoroughly noticeable coming back the last mile on Day St., which is a straight, wide street. Here we were, going pretty level, and not too fast, and the old heart rate was back at 85% of maximum.

A fun ride, all-in-all, but then the guys had to bolt for their homes, which were being lightly covered in falling ash, and which had been seriously menaced 4 years before. Everybody keep your fingers crossed.

From MapMyRide.com:
      distance:    54.4 miles
  total ascent:   4,100 ft

Tom’s Cycle Computer:
      distance:    54.8 miles
   saddle time: 4:57:05       (not counting rests)
 average speed:    11.1 mph   (not counting rests)
previous speed:    10.7 mph   (not counting rests)

Carlos’s Edge 305:
      Distance:   55.86 miles (includes small detour)
    Total time: 6:33:38       (including rests)
     Avg Speed:     8.5 mph   (including rests)
     Max Speed:    42.9 mph   (eek!)
        Ascent:   5,586 ft

Vincent’s Edge 305:
        Ascent:   6,345 ft   (does not include a small part of the ride)

“Slightly faster! Excellent!”