29.2 mi / 9.6 mph / 2229 ft. climbing
Home: Little Pond State Park

The trees continued to drip onto the tent all night long, and into the morning. But at some point it had switched from being rain-remnants, to being fog condensing on the leaves and then falling from them in solid form. That’s something I don’t remember experiencing outside of the Pacific Northwest. As we departed, we could see that the valleys continued to be cloaked in fog as well, perhaps another effect of the well-saturated ground that became overfilled with the remnants of Hurricane Debby a week ago.

Today’s ride profile was an improbable near-duplicate of yesterday’s: a bit of a climb to get out of our mountaintop campground, a 7-mile descent to a Delaware River crossing (this time the East Branch instead of the West Branch), climb 200 feet back up to the top of a dam, a lengthy “flat” section along the reservoir behind it (Pepacton vs. Cannonsville), and finally end with another big climb up to the next mountaintop campground.

Unlike yesterday’s ride, where we were able to hit a real grocery store in the middle, today we would only go through a single town, Downsville, and a Dollar General was their only store. We took a similar strategy of “frozen Chinese meal”, which seems to thaw just about exactly how we’d want it over the course of the day.

Today’s 1000-foot climb wasn’t as well-graded as yesterday’s steady 7%. This one did the first half at a nice easy 3%, but since it covered the same 3.3-mile distance as yesterday’s, the unforgiving math required a 10% average for the second half (rising to 12-13% in places). The regularly-spaced farm properties were making Rett uncomfortable about stopping for lunch, but luckily I finally convinced her that it would be no problem setting up our chairs on the roadside across from an empty farmhouse. Because right after our stop is where the road tipped up, and even with the fresh calories in her, it nearly killed her.

What I refrained from telling her until we got to the top is that my left pedal began clicking at the start of the climb, a sound that would have been less-ominous if hers hadn’t started making the exact same clicking sound just before it completely failed a couple weeks ago. We had been in Skaneateles then, so it was no problem getting new pedals from Amazon. Here, we might be considerably more fucked: if grocery stores are a rarity, there certainly aren’t any bike shops nearby!

From the top of climb we had six miles to go to camp, and unlike yesterday’s profile, there was a decent downhill after the peak. So we rolled down that, attempting to get as far as we could with a minimal amount of pedaling. With four miles to go I stopped to see if there was any adjustment I could to do fix (or at least Band-Aid) the problem. I estimated it would take me about 20 minutes of fiddling with ball bearings and grease and wrenches. With nothing in this day-after-day of monster hills easing Rett’s exhaustion or giving her any feeling of relaxation, we carefully made the decision to have her ride without me to camp so she could get showered and settled-in sooner. We almost never separate when riding, and this was an especially-risky case since we had lost cell-phone coverage miles ago. But she took down the detailed directions, we made a plan for when to step into action if I hadn’t yet turned up to camp, and off she went. I figured that even if I made my pedal worse and had to simply remove it, I would be able to limp four miles on just the spindle.

I don’t think I really made it worse, but the clicking continued immediately when I restarted, so I clearly hadn’t magically fixed it either. I stopped twice more over the four miles to try additional adjustments, the second time when the pedal actually began locking up and not rotating on its spindle, which basically makes it useless as it throws your foot off on every rotation of the cranks. At that point I just removed the pedal body and rode on the spindle for the final half-mile, partly to see if it would be possible for me to do the same thing over the much-longer distance it would take to get to a bike shop, or if a more-dramatic rescue of some sort would be needed tomorrow. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked, with a horizontal groove in the tread of my sandal sort of hugging the spindle and letting it rotate within that groove.

Amongst the physical, mental, and mechanical exhaustion, I had to remind Rett that several days ago when I had presented the choice, she had chosen a “walk-in” site on the far end of Little Pond, a quarter mile from the main campground, which would now just add more difficulty to our lives. She was still finishing up at the shower, so I headed off to find the campsite, and was pleased to at least find that the trail circling the pond was easily-ridable, and even paved for a section at the start.

And the site was awesome, with us both agreeing that it was easily worth the extra trouble. It again was huge, despite being tucked right up against the water, and even with people going by on the trail, felt really private like we had just discovered this perfect spot to pitch our tent on the shore of an undiscovered pond. And it had its own toilet! Just a small wooden pit toilet, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a site with our very own toilet! (all ~10 of the walk-in sites had one of their own).

And it had a bear box! Which always makes it easier to organize our stuff, and allows me to sleep more soundly because it reduces my concerns about non-bear critters trying to get into our bags. We didn’t even really think about actual bears, so we were both more surprised than we should have been, when after dinner, a couple of guys on kayaks floating nearby called to Rett: “do you know there’s a bear right by you?”

Wait, what?! I barely saw him before he trundled back up the hill and disappeared in the trees, but Rett estimates he might have been about ten feet from where she had been washing dishes! She started clapping and making noise, which is exactly what they tell you to do, so it’s good to now have experience that that advice is actually helpful (in our previous black bear encounters in Glacier and Yellowstone, they’d clearly already been doing their own things and ignoring us, so we just observed as they moved away without needing any encouragement).

I hadn’t thought I’d have the time or energy to do any more work with my pedal, but once the bear had cleared out we actually had an enjoyable time to relax so I did a much-deeper investigation than I had been able to do on the roadside. I removed all the balls from the bearing, and cleaned off all the grease (which left the sparkle of metal filings on my fingers, certainly not a good indicator). A couple of the balls were significantly flattened, and the bearing cup itself had a couple visible nicks and gouges. That 100% confirmed it was not a problem that adjustments could fix; the bearing was failing. I put it back together anyway, with new grease, but when I threaded the pedal body back onto the spindle, it got to a point halfway where I could neither screw it on further, or pull it back off. Crap! So much for the option of just riding on the spindle! My offline map indicated the next bike shop is in Woodstock, which we weren’t scheduled to reach until the day after tomorrow! But then I realized that the pedal actually spun freely in its half-on position. Huh. Guess we’ll try it tomorrow and see what happens!