Game Day

A couple posts ago, I said the weather felt like practice for winter. Yesterday felt like the test of that training, the season opener, even though the solstice and true start of winter are still over a week away. Mid morning, I checked the outdoor thermometer, and it was reading the upper end of single digits. I was surprised. It looked so sunny and warm outside, and in a house designed to take advantage of passive solar heating, the temperature inside rose a degree over the next twenty minutes.

Granted, it was 43°F inside at the start of that twenty minutes. Yes, I let my house get "cold", but not freezing. For one, I'm cheap. For two, I find lots of layers comfy. And for three, I like going outside, and as it turns colder out there, I don't want to feel shocking when I step out the door. I treat acclimatization as a full time project. I also donned a second pair of longjohns for the first time this season as well as a second pair of wool socks.

After a semi unsettling interaction with a hunter last week, my inclination to, during deer season, not walk the state land across the street, which abuts hunting club property, has been reinforced. So, for a hike, I rode my bike three miles down the street to more frequently walked and ridden trails, and hunters that, hopefully, expect to see other users. As a bonus, I also like variety, so that let me walk the old trolley line to where I could access the Lithia  Springs Reservoir trails and then climb to the Holyoke Range ridgeline and the New England Trail. There is snow on the ground, but at just a few inches, and tracks in most places, it does little to resist hiking.

The reservoir, 

with ice that supported my weight at its edge, 

the weakest point.

The ridge

The Pioneer Valley isn't the White Mountains, but it won me for excellent balance

 of woods and culture.

Shortly after reaching the ridge, I received an email asking if I could meet that afternoon to sell a pair of handlebars I'd posted on Craigslist. They came to me attached to a bike, and like most modern handlebars, they were super wide. I prefer to fit between the trees that line the trails I like to ride, and while I could easily have cut them, I felt it made better use of resources for me to buy already narrow bars from Hampshire Bicycle Exchange and pass the wide ones along to someone (most people) who like that.

I tend not to hike with my warehouse of bike parts for sale, so I checked with the interested buyer if 4pm was too late to meet. Answer: likely yes. OK, my very rough plannish-type-thing had been to, maybe, descend from the ridge through Earl's Trails and snag a PVTA bus from the vicinity of Hampshire College to the south side of the notch near where I left my bike. There is also a bus stop atop the notch, and checking the schedule I saw the next bus I could conceivably catch was in forty minutes. Even my trail running racers are mostly fast hiking up the hills and trying to keep up with gravity coming back down, which is my lazy way of "running". 

Lazy is also less sweaty, so my hike turned into a modified, extra-easy trot, and I made it to the notch bus stop with two minutes to spare, which spared me almost two hours on making it home before four! I may still have some angst about the PVTA blaming the deer for the damages to my bike last year, but I'm still really happy the transit system exists. So too, indirectly, was the handlebar buyer, who lives in Ashfield and was happy I could meet him on short notice when work had him passing through the area. He also appreciated that I tranport myself by bike and so shovel only a two foot width down my seldom-driven-way. We both were happy to combine trips and cuts out a bunch of car miles!

I do shovel a parking spot at the road,

for visitors who need such.