I've clearly been a bad blogger all these months and have neglected this blog. But, now that I'm done teaching for the semester, I have a bit more time to write for fun. Its turns out I've really missed writing, and I'm glad to be back at it again.
Shortly after I moved to Amherst, I started to look enviously at all the folks that were jumping on their mountain bikes to go for a ride. I had, for all practical purposes, never mountain biked before, and have actually gone through periods in my life where I was offended by mountain bikers (we trail runners hate sharing trails with anyone). Probably more than anything, though, reading Jill Horner's blog (which used to be called Up in Alaska, and is now called Jill Outside, since she moved to Montana) has been the biggest influence on me wanting to become more of a mountain biker. If you've never checked out Jill's blog, you've got to do so. She is an unbelievable photographer and an extraordinary outdoorswoman (for lack of a better word) and her bicycle adventures inspire me nearly everday.
So, I've begun to make some preliminary forays into mountain biking, and I have to say...at this point I think I love it nearly as much (if not more?) than trail running. This is all rather amusing to say because at this point I don't even OWN my own mountain bike (I'm still riding my Trek hybrid). But, I hope to make my first mountain bike purchase in a couple of days, and so I'll be an official mountain biker then.
Deciding which bike to buy has been tough. Most of the riding I'm doing now is on old dirt carriage roads at Cadwell Forest and the Quabbin. There are occasional single track trails (with rocks and stumps), but these obstacles are few and far between at this point. I would like to spend more time on single track trails eventually, but I also feel like I've got a lot to learn regarding mountain biking before I tak
e that plunge. So for now I'm pretty happy just touring some (relatively) remote places by bike.I'll write about it more in later posts, but right now one of my favorite places to bike is the backroads of the Quabbin. Again, I'll post more about the interesting history of the Quabbin in my later posts, but for now, I'll post some pictures of a few recent rides there. Its unbelievably beautiful, and a shame (but not really) that more people haven't discovered the beauty of the Quabbin.
