Another River Ride

Some photos from another weekend ride on the Nooksack River Trail, past Slater Road. It was a pretty ride with dappled sun and shade, pleasant temperatures and a light sprinkle of rain.

The trail is pretty over-grown with bushes and blackberry vines that will grab your sleeves and scratch your legs. Someone should get out there with a weed-whacker. Also there are some patches of fine sand, not very big but deep enough to grab your front wheel and throw you off the saddle.

At one place where the trail usually washes out during the winter floods, a detour was set up for trail work beyond that point as far as Marine Drive. I had to lift my bike over the sand bags and down about a foot to get to a section of double-track grass and dirt, which was pleasant and easy to ride on my gravel-and-touring bike, but would have been tricky on my Cannondale Synapse. In fact the whole trail would have been hard work on a skinnier-tire bike. Along the way I met a group of older riders - about my age, actually, come to think of it - on fat-tire e-bikes who seemed to find the ride a little rougher than they expected. I guess they thought the electric assist would make things easy, but the heavy bikes must have been hard to manage getting through the sand on the narrow tracks. But we all need to get out there are challenge ourselves!

At a Y-fork in the trail I took the left branch, which looked like it had been recently mowed for the first time that summer and was covered with thick thatch and deep stubble. But it was only a short side-trip, ending at a small pond or puddle in a very fertile wet-land. The reeds and rushes here are impressive, almost two inches in diameter or width. This wet-land area is open for hunting in duck-season, and maybe wouldn't be the best place to ride when people are out with fire-arms.

The rough trail ended here and I turned back and followed the dirt road through the woods to the car-parking lot at Marine Drive, then turned back again toward home.

The bridge at Marine Drive