base

started the weekend with a couple of hours on the road bike on saturday morning, up through rock creek park to tuckerman lane, then seven locks, bradley, and eventually back into the city on macarthur... 45 minutes to refuel and warm up before heading back out onto the streets down to dupont circle to sit in on part of the MORE transistion meeting and spring trail liasons meeting to talk about plans for the website... snow started just before the meeting finished up and i rode home through the snow...

wake up sunday morning to a inch or so of fresh snow and more still falling... not the beautiful dry snow from last weekend, but i hit the road with my singlespeed in tow to head up to montgomery county to try to get another snow ride in... the snow in the city didn't look encouraging, a bit wet and slushy, but as i got further north the conditions improved, and the snow in the parking lot a schaeffer looked great...

ran into dietrich and rob from the team, and a friend of theirs in the parking lot as they were getting ready to ride and we hit the trails together, just as the snow started up again. there were only a couple of other cars in the lot and we got first tracks on a couple of sections, riding with big snowflakes falling around us. yellow, out blue to cut through the fields, then back to yellow around the far fields loop... back at the 4-way, we headed down yellow then cut onto the new trails, and over to white, through the pines and back to the trailhead... normally an hour or less but it took us 2 hours...

conditions were mostly pretty good, hard pack with a couple inches of fresh snow... there were some sections where snow from last weekend had drifted and piled up and was pretty choppy. by the end of the ride things were getting a bit slushy as a sun came out... with the temperatures climbing this week hopefully they'll close the gate.

this year's first batch of beer is ready to bottle...