The Birds and the Bees (and the Bikes)

Back in March, I wrote a series of posts looking at each leg of the Gold Rush Randonnee route, from the start in Davis to the turn around point in Davis Creek. Now that we are only 8 days from the start, I realize that I never finished looking at the rest of the route. [...]

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One of the members of the Randon mailing list, Tom (don’t know the last name) is riding the Gold Rush Randonnee next month, and he did a ride this past weekend from Susanville to Taylorville and back, and then from Susanville to Adin. That section is the part of the GRR route with most of [...]

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I read all the ride reports that I could find from the 2005 Gold Rush Randonnee, which was held at the end of July. I also talked with a few riders who completed that ride. All of them remember vividly the brutal heat. It was scorching hot, over 100F, in the Central Valley between Davis [...]

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I carry a cell phone on my rides. But fairly often, I end up in areas where T-Mobile has no reception. The staffed control in Vernonia on our spring Birkie 200 brevet is one of them. You can call if you have ATT or Verizon, but not T-Mobile. Same story along the coast on the [...]

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Eating enough on a long ride (400k and above) has always been a problem for me. I get tired, and my brain gets less interested in food. Having small town convenience stores as control location does not work for me, there is very little that I find appealing in those places. Slightly better are controls [...]

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The first long ride that I did on my current bike, three years ago, was a 200k permanent from Bingen to Roosevelt and back. I did not have a bike computer, so I took a GPS to keep track of distance and elevation. There is one hill on that climb that is a few hundred [...]

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The next two legs bring the riders to the turnaround point at Davis Creek, a few miles from the Oregon border. The 20 miles of open road to Davis Creek are slightly uphill. Wind was an issue for some riders on this leg in 2005, according to some ride reports. It will be nice to [...]

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In 2005, Adin (4200 ft) is the control where a lot of riders stopped for the night, or at least for a couple hours nap. According to the ride reports I read, the control in Susanville did not have air conditioning, and it was hard for people to rest. Adin was a better choice for [...]

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The more I look at the stats and the more I read rider’s stories from the 2005 and 2001 edition [added 5 more reports to my collection today], the more I am impressed by those riders. They mean business. The fast riders don’t seem to slow down for anything, not heat, not lack of sleep, [...]

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As we have seen in the analysis of the previous legs in the Gold Rush Randonnee, the 290 km to Taylorvile (almost half way to the turn around point), does not look too bad. We climb from the nearly sea level elevation in Davis to the 3600 ft elevation in Taylorville, but the climbing up [...]

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