Forest Park Ride - Saturday June 24th, 2006

According to this website there's over 5,000 wooded acres. It's the largest forested natural area within city limits in the United States. You'd think there'd be some good mountain bike trails here right? Wrong.

This magazine called the Portland Monthly (does Milwaukee, WI have a monthly magazine dedicated to it?) was talking up the park and had 5 different rides posted in it. So I thought cool. I'll do the hardest one so I can really see what it's all about. I had my hopes up drooling over the possibility of single track.

It's probably a good for hiking or horse riding but for mtn biking don't waste your time. I think riding up and down the ski hills back in Wisco was more fun that this... All the good singletrack had No Bikes signs, which including a posting about a $500 fine.

So I basically kept to the only thing that I could ride. Firelanes as they are called. Basically double track but unlike the rolling fairly flat double track back in Wisco, these firelanes basically went straight up the mountain or straight down the mountain. Here I had a choice. Take the singletrack (what looked like singletrack anyway) to the left or continue to climb this hellish mountain up. I took the left for about 1000ft of what was basically and overgrown fireline - not single track.

There was some small section of singletrack at the bottom of one of the firelanes (Firelane #10) that was pretty good. It crossed a creek and I even had to walk a section because of all the rocks in the creek made it impassible.

Over the rocks and under the tree.

One final note. After flying down one of the firelanes feathering the disc brakes the whole way they started to make sounds I never heard before. So I of course asked myself, "I wonder how hot my discs are getting? Are they going to hold up?" So like an idiot, I touched them to see how hot they were. Nothing like burning your finger tips. Look, there's even the imprint of the brake rotor on my fingers.

Book Review: The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

I had a hard time getting through this book. Probably because it was written in 1895, 111 years ago. We were walking through Powell's books the other day, which is a famous Portland locale, and I was in the moment because the place is so huge and had all these great books. The store was divided into sections, each of which easily could've been a free standing store on it's own. The store took up a whole city block with multiple stories. And they stock used books too which is pretty cool. Anyway, back to the book. I also think the author wasted too much time talking about street names and places in London which I had no idea where they were. He almost expected the reader to have lived in London, and I guess back then, prior to the great wars of the 1900's (WWI and WWII) before the US made its debut on the world scene, Britain was sort of the most powerful nation. Anyway - I didn't really get into the book that much. I made it through it just on principle I guess - I figured if I read this far I might as well finish the damn thing. It's interesting to note that both movies made from it veer from the storyline quite abit, including taking place here in the US. Even the famous Orsen Wells radio version that scared a bunch of people. 2 / 5 stars.