Hiking with vigor

Cliff Noyes, 89, still getting it done

I used to think I was in pretty decent shape, at least for a guy in his 60s.

But then one day I tried to hike with the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area-based Tuesday Vigorous Hikers group and learned just how wrong I was.

The group of mostly senior adventurers—with regulars ranging in age of up to 81–left me in the dust by the time I had cleared the first rise out of the parking lot.

That was the last I saw of them that day, and no wonder. Their weekly workout consists of a 15 to 20-mile trek, with 3,000 to 5,000 feet of elevation gain, at a pace averaging up to 3.5 miles per hour, says Dave Green, 67, one of the group’s coordinators.

“Tuesday hikes are for hikers in good condition,” the group advises on its web site: https://sites.google.com/site/tuesdayvigoroushikers/. “Age does not matter, but you should understand what it means to hike 16 or so miles with 3,000 feet or more of climbing.”

To get to the requisite fitness level, wannabes should start on easier terrain, veteran group members say.

“The optimal way to train for hiking and backpacking is to hike and backpack, but modestly at first and gradually building up,” says Robert Livezey, 76, a coordinator for the group.

A regular hiking program is also important, particularly for older adventurers. “If I skip a week, I know the next one will be harder,” says Gene Whitaker, 81, another coordinator for the group. “The objective should be to get some exercise and enjoy the outdoors … not to try to keep up with the fastest hikers in our group,” Whitaker says.

Cliff Noyes, 89, who originally launched the weekday hiking group more than 20 years ago, says he still often participates. He has no plan to retire from the hiking group, though has been hiking at half the distance and pace as group regulars recently.

On his to-do list for 2020: a two-week hike through Tuscany on the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage route from France to Rome, with his three sons. “Maybe celebrate my 90th birthday trailside,” Noyes says.

The good news for the mere mortals among us is that the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, Tuesday Vigorous Hiker’s sponsor, also sponsors hiking groups with more moderate ambitions.

One of the groups, Midweek Hikers, often offers shorter and longer-mileage versions of each week’s hike, with one of seven miles, say, and another of 14.

Another group, the Easy Hikers, offers weekly walks of three to five miles, according to PATC’s website, www.patc.net.

“My motto is, use it or lose it,” says Carol Christensen, 71, a 14-year veteran of the Vigorous Hikers group.

Couldn’t agree more.

Meanwhile, I’m still in training in hopes of being able to keep up with Christensen and the other  hard-chargers in the Tuesday Vigorous Hikers some day.

Christensen

Whitaker, regular at the 41-mile Hike Across Maryland

Livezey

Green

Weapons on wheels

• 
  

  Doug Halonen

  November 6 at 10:56 AM

  This summer, another cyclist I met on the Great Divide route told me he was carrying a pistol for his personal protection. I hadn't heard of this before but am now wondering whether this is a relatively common practice? Do you carry some sort of weapon when you ride? If so, what, and have you ever used it? I was carrying a can of bear spray at the time. Never used it. Thanks!

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  Along with their tents and sleeping bags, some touring cyclists are packing pistols these days, to protect themselves from a variety of predators, including two-legged snakes.

  
  

  The guns, they say, provide them with peace of mind.

  
  

   “I carry a gun on every bike ride,” said one cyclist, in response to a question I posted on three Facebook cycling groups I follow. “It takes no effort to put a gun on, and if I ever need it, I’ll certainly be glad for that extra pound,” the cyclist continued.

  
  

  “I am a female who carries when riding solo or with a few other gals,” added another rider. “15 ounces loaded. Don’t even know it’s there. Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.”

  
  

  Judging from the online comments from cyclists in response to my question, carriage of guns by cyclists is controversial. Of the more than 200 commenters, 12 made clear that they regularly carry guns on their bikes.

  
  

  Some carriage foes are concerned that the guns, which they see as unnecessary, could cause unintended injury, due to itchy trigger fingers or accidental discharge.

  “The statistics are clear that firearms are much more likely to kill owner or innocent bystander than a predator,” said one cyclist.

  
  

  Said another, however: “There will be some who carry and you will never know it. It doesn’t make you more or less safe by the fact that they choose to do that. The ones who carry aren’t going to rob or shoot you.”

  
  

  Judging from the comments, the carriage issue appears to be especially sensitive to cyclists outside the US. “I’m from the UK where we have sensible gun laws,” said one cyclist from across the pond. “Carrying a pistol whilst cycling would get you prison time.”

  
  

  Said still another cyclist, however: “I carry what I want and don’t care what others think.”

  
  

  Many of the respondents who don’t carry guns on their bikes do carry bear spray when they are in bear country, according to the comments. “I live in NW Montana and carry bear spray while cycling, be it for bears, mountain lions, or people,” said one respondent.

  
  

  “I carry both bear spray and a pistol,” said another.

  
  

   “Only in America would this actually be a conversation,” said another cyclist. “I’m saddened to see that gun culture has permeated even the more progressive world of bike packing. If you were in Canada, people would just laugh at you for even considering it.”

  
  

   “Apparently you are ignorant of free speech, one of the rights Americans have, along with firearms,” said another, in response.

  
  

  
  

   And so forth and so forth…

  
  

No Sleep for the Cheap

During most of my bicycle touring of the 335-mile Great Allegheny Passage/C&O Canal path linkup, I have camped at night, mainly at free campsites along the trail, and those arrangements all worked fine for me.

But one afternoon during a solo tour of the GAP/C&O, I booked a berth at a $15-a-night Hancock, MD, bunkhouse. Had I not called ahead to pay for a spot and arrived at dusk after a long hot day on the bike, I would have heeded the pleas of my inner voice to flee.

As it was, I got nary a wink that night, and mostly because my intuition told me that my bunkmates, Jacob and Louie (not their real names), were up to no good. I was concerned that if I fell asleep, some of my gear would disappear.

The bunkhouse, basically a screened-off structure on the side of a chainlink-fenced lot behind a town bicycle shop, was funky and memorable on its own merits.

To the credit of the bunkhouse management, the showers, which were built into converted portapotties, and the portapotty potties themselves, were clean and functional, and came generously stocked with TP and hand sanitizer.

There also was an outdoor sink, which was not hooked up to the garden hose that apparently is used to supply it, when I arrived. The sink drained directly into the soil below. Since no facility manager was on site when I arrived, I wasn’t sure whether the hose water was potable so didn’t drink it. 

I found my bunk in the bunkhouse too narrow for my comfort. The 16 beds were stacked into eight wooden, bunkbed-style units. The individual platforms were covered with thin foam camping pads. I flipped the pad and whisked the dust bunnies and clumps of hair off my bunk before unrolling my own sleeping pad on top.

It was too warm to bother with a sleeping bag that night. But I covered myself with my lightweight bag liner and contemplated trying to get to sleep.

Unfortunately, I did not have ear plugs, which could have muffled the din of the passing trains and the staccato blasts of the semi-trailer truck airbrakes on I-70 nearby.

Along with the traffic tunes, some sort of small animals were skittering and peeping either within the walls or across the roof. I searched for the culprits with my headlamp, but never spotted them inside the structure.

It was really my concerns about Jacob and Louie that kept me awake, however.

They had bikes, and Jacob said they had been touring together for a week or so. But the chain-smoking, beer-drinking duo seemed to have no particular destinations in mind. They didn’t seem much like any other cyclists I have met on the road. For one thing, I have never met other serious cyclists who chain-smoked cigarettes.

Jacob was in his late 30s, and Louie appeared to be in his late 20s. Louie, who had long blond hair, told me he planned to ride around the country seeking out music festivals. He was hauling his belongings in a second-hand bike trailer, the kind that suburban dads use to tote their tots on the neighborhood bike path. Jacob, who had short, neatly-trimmed hair, said he had recently acquired a plastic shower curtain to make it more comfortable for him to sleep outside in the rain. He planned to head north. I didn’t ask how either was financing his vagabond adventure, but Jacob told me he was open to seeking employment.

Both expressed an uncomfortable amount of interest in my gear. Louie told a story about a guy who loaned a car to one of his friends, and somebody else had given him his bike, and wasn’t that cool and how the world should operate, with the haves sharing with the have-nots? 

It’s possible they were OK, maybe just down on their luck and trying too hard to be friendly and accommodating. If so, my apologies for doubting, and go in peace, brothers. But my inner voice was sounding an alarm, and I kept my wallet and iPhone in the pockets of the pants that I wore to bed. Much of my gear was stacked beside my bed on the bunkhouse’s wooden floor.

Every time I started nodding off, I heard them whispering to each other at the far end of the darkened bunkhouse. Insomniacs? High? Or waiting for me to fall asleep to pounce?

A lone bird started chirping, loudly and continually, at about 4:30 a.m., and I got out of bed and packed quietly. More whispering. “Doug’s leaving,” I heard one of them say.

I had a quick breakfast at the town Hardee’s when it opened at 6 a.m. Then, with a couple of back-to-back days of rain looming in the forecast, I got an early start on my 126-mile, Mountain Dew-fueled ride home.

Lessons relearned: Don’t buy a pig in a poke, and sometimes you get what you pay for.

Coal rollers and unleashed dogs

Two things I always keep an eye out for while bike touring are coal rollers and unleashed dogs.

Coal rollers modify the pollution-control devices on their diesel pickup trucks so they can blast cyclists, pedestrians, Toyota Priuses, and other favorite targets, with suffocating plumes of black smoke as they pass.

They think it’s hilarious to see how close they can get as they swoop by. You can see them laughing, checking for your reaction in their rear-view mirrors. 

Some unleashed dogs that give chase are probably just having fun and don’t seem all that serious about it.

But others, particularly country farm dogs, appear to mean business when they’re hustling after you, and I have met cyclists who have suffered serious bites.

Even if they don’t bite, unleashed dogs can cause injury to themselves and cyclists, just by getting underfoot.

I have been told that coal rolling is illegal everywhere, but that doesn’t seem to have discouraged this dangerous practice.

The best defense I have found is awareness. When cycling through rural areas, I regularly check my rear-view mirror for approaching diesel pickup trucks to avoid being taken by surprise. Smokestack exhaust pipes are often part of this foul bird’s plumage.

When I get coal rolled, I try to ignore the roller, denying them the reaction they seek. My hope is that will discourage them.

With an unleashed dog, if I can’t outrun it, I cuss it out big time. Sometimes that’s enough to stop it in its tracks.

If it keeps coming, I get off the bike, use it as a shield and point my can of pepper spray at the beast.

At least thus far, I have not actually had to spray a dog with the stuff. Just pointing the can in the dog’s direction seems to have done the trick. A lot of dogs that give chase on popular cycling routes are likely to be habitual offenders. They’ve probably been sprayed before. So pointing the spray may be enough. They’ve been there before and don’t want another taste.

I find it hard to believe that the coal rollers will still be yukking it up if and when their pinheaded pranks cause serious injury and they wind up cooling their heels in jail.

For the dogs, I blame their owners.

Pepper spray: Don't leave home without it

Bicycle touring solo

It’s safer to tour by bicycle with a partner or group than to head out into the great unknown alone.

So ride with a group if you can. If you’ve got deep pockets, you can join a guided expedition. You also may be able to find a like-minded partner or a group on a touring website, such as this one: https://www.adventurecycling.org/adventure-cyclist/companions-wanted/.

But if those approaches don’t work for you, don’t let the fear of traveling solo derail your touring ambitions, or you may never get out there. 

I did my first multi-day tour in 2011 (of the 335-mile Great Allegheny Passage/C&O Canal trail linkup between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.) with a friend, and I had a great time and enjoyed my friend’s company.

Though I was bitten by the touring bug and was eager to do additional tours, I found that I was unable to recruit companions for many of my subsequent efforts, and my fear of soloing discouraged me from touring for the next five years.

In 2016, a three-month window of opportunity opened for me to attempt a coast-to-coast tour. Again, none of my friends or acquaintances had the time or the desire to accompany me. Despite some uneasiness, I headed out on my bicycle alone, and discovered that many of my anxieties about soloing had been unwarranted.

In fact, over time I have found that I prefer some aspects of soloing, especially the flexibility that it offers. While soloing, I have complete authority to make all decisions, including over how fast and far to ride each day, where to stay and when to take a rest day.

When I ride at my own pace, I can ride comfortably all day and I enjoy the touring experience. When I try to keep up with more competitive individuals who may be faster and stronger than I am, I burn out quickly and can lose appetite for the tour. To me, adding competition to the touring mix—riding with individuals focused on proving who is the stronger rider—is a recipe for negativity, exhaustion, injury and other disaster. I’d prefer to be able to stop to smell the roses whenever I want to.

I have also discovered that as long as I stick to established touring routes, I have been able to meet and team up with other like-minded adventurers much of the time. Many of the companions I have met on tour have preferred to ride at their own pace alone during the day but meet at day’s end for dinner in town or at a shared campsite.

If you tour alone, it’s especially important to heed your inner voice.

I have passed on a few of the many free campsites available along touring routes while soloing, if and when it appeared that other campers at the site might be a problem. 

I have never been robbed or physically assaulted on tour. But on the handful of occasions I’ve ignored my inner voice and camped in places that my intuition urged me to avoid, I have sometimes been harassed or otherwise gotten more sleepless adventure than I would prefer.

While soloing, I usually carry some form of pepper spray for security against unleashed dogs, two-legged snakes, and other potential predators.  As of this writing, I have yet to actually deploy the spray but have occasionally pointed the can in a pursuing dog’s direction. Still, it makes me feel better to know I have the spray.

Some touring venues are riskier to solo than others. 

The Adventure Cycling Association, for instance, recommends that the 2,700-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which travels mostly over remote gravel roads between Canada and Mexico, be ridden in groups with at least three riders.

“If a rider is debilitated in the backcountry, you will want to have at least one person to stay with the injured/sick rider, and another to go for help,” ACA says.

If you nonetheless opt to ride the GDMBR or other remote trails on your own, you should consider carrying a personal locater beacon, such as a SPOT or Garmin inReach.

These devices use satellite technology to track your location and allow you to summon assistance during emergencies. They are not reliant on the availability of cellular phone signals.

If you can’t recruit companions, you don’t have to let your fear of soloing prevent you from touring altogether. But if you go alone, pay attention to your intuition and carry the appropriate technology for your protection.

Planning a bicycle tour

Adventure Cycling Association map

The fun part about bike touring is the riding.

Planning is less jolly.

But figuring out where to go, how to get from point A to B, where to sleep and get water and other supplies is critical to the success of any touring adventure.

The easiest but most expensive solution is to book a guided tour and leave the planning to others.

To take charge of your own trip, you will have have to do at least some research, whether carrying all of your own gear on your bike or using a support vehicle to transport cargo.

A great place to start is the Adventure Cycling Association, because the Missoula, MT-based organization has done a lot of the requisite research for the 48,608 miles of bike-friendly routes it has mapped in North America.

The ACA maps identify a route’s campgrounds, motels, grocery stores, bicycle shops, post offices and elevation profiles. The post office information is useful for mailing resupply packages. Elevation is good to know when estimating how far to try to ride on a particular day.

The maps also provide turn-by-turn directions for the routes. Since the turns on ACA paper maps are marked by mileage, cyclists need accurately calibrated cyclometers to stay on track with them.

When using ACA’s paper maps, call ahead to make sure that any businesses you are relying on are still in operation, and check the association’s web site for updates and corrections. 

The association also sells digital versions of its maps as GPX data that work on a user’s GPS device or smartphone. Digital map information can also be acquired through an ACA smartphone app.

During a weeklong tour of a section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route earlier this year, I used all three technologies, but found that I relied mostly on the turn-by-turn cue sheets included in the ACA paper maps and GPX data that I downloaded to my Garmin eTrex 20x.

I used the GPX track for the Tour Divide bike race on the eTrex. The Tour Divide, an annual endurance bike contest, mostly follows the GDMBR from Banff, Canada, to Antelope Wells, N.M. The Tour Divide GPX track is available free at topofusion.com.

I thought both the eTrex GPX and the ACA smartphone app tracks were extremely helpful and made navigating and staying on route easy. But the eTrex ran for several days on two replaceable AA batteries while the ACA app drained my iPhone battery within five or six hours.

The eTrex has also proved to be less susceptible to the cold than my smartphone. My smartphone literally freezes and stops working whenever it gets chilly. My eTrex has yet to fail for weather-related reasons.  But the vulnerabilities of the smartphone underscore why it’s a good idea to carry a paper map and compass to back up the electronic navigational devices.

When searching for bike-friendly routes over paved roads, I’ve had fairly good luck using the cycling option on the Google Maps smartphone app.

If you are planning to ship your bike at the beginning and/or end of your tour, a great resource is bikeflights.com. The company specializes in arranging bike shipments and may be able to get you better deals through UPS or Federal Express than you can. The website provides instructions on how to pack your bike yourself, if you want to economize. You can buy a hard or soft shipping case, or simply get a used shipping box from your local bike shop. The website also provides a list of bike shops that will pack and ship or receive and reassemble your bike for a fee.

For my mini-tour of the Great Divide, I used bikeflights.com to ship my bike to the Whitefish Bike Retreat. The retreat, a hostel and camping facility for mountain bikers and bike-packers outside the town of Whitefish, MT, holds bikes for guests for free. I reassembled my bike in the retreat’s shop. My friend Dave and I also booked space on the retreat’s shuttle to start our GDMBR ride at the U.S./Canada border.

Other great resources for researching bike routes are the journals on crazyguyonabike.com.

I read several while researching my GDMBR ride, including this one:

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1mr&doc_id=18096&v=17o.

Still another great resource for planning a GDMBR ride is Michael McCoy’s, Cycling the Great Divide https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Great-Divide-Americas-Long-Distance/dp/1594858195. The book provides a lot of great information about the route and suggests an itinerary.  I downloaded the McCoy book to my iPhone and read the relevant sections daily to help plan each day’s ride.

ACA map elevation profile

Whitefish Bike Retreat hostel

Bike retreat bicycle handrail

Bike retreat shuttle