Monday, October 24, 2011

PA Explorations on the Mukluk

I took my new Mukluk to State College on a family visit trip and managed to sneak in a four hour ride on Sunday morning.  It is hard to decide which bike(s) to take as there is so much good riding in the area.  I feel like I could take them all and ride for a month and still have the hankering for more.   But the Mukluk is new and I was eager to learn more about its character, so I brought that.

Sunday morning started very chilly with 30F temps and frost on the car windows.  Brrr, winter is coming.  I brought some colder gear but not for 30F.  So I waited for a little bit and then dressed as much as possible to head out in to the cold.   I went to the Shingletown gap to start.  This is one of the rockiest, most technical 3-mile rock garden excuse for a trail.  The mukluk did ok, but there was lots of bouncing off the plentiful angular rocks, no match for a full susp bike that I rode here earlier in the summer.  

This area had received a lot of rain recently and a small part of the gap trail was concurrent with a stream bed.  There was one section with about 6" of muddy muck and the big tires on the fat bike went right through without too much drama.   Once I hit the fire road, I encountered a big 50 mile trail race in progress.  It was a relay and there were about 100 people standing up at the saddle, very strange.  So I dove off course down the Shingletown Rd, a grassy, fast descent.  There aren't any large rocks in this trail, but lots of small, high frequency bumps to jiggle you loose on the way down.  Again, this bike is NOT a full susp bike.   

I then turned up Pine Swamp Rd, across on 26, and started to explore more forest service roads I had not been on before.   I found a snowmobile trail, Pump Station Rd, that was a grassy, rocky climb for 1.5 miles on 10% to 20% steady grades.   I put the bike in its lower gears and went in to rock-crawler mode. I made it up the long ascent without too much effort, but it was slow going.   Once over the top of Tussey Ridge, I went down a switch-backy fire road down to PA Furnace on Rte 45.  Parts of the road are nicely graded forest road, then without warning, it turns in to a rocky jeep trail, again with an impromptu stream running down it.  I've never seen anything like this before, it is almost as if the nice road disappears in to someones 4x4 play course.   


Not wanting to ride back to town on 10 miles of road, I went back up the gap and hooked up with a long, straight, amazingly flat forest service road that ran the length of the ridge.  I dumped out on Pine Grove Mountain and made my way back to town.

Overall the bike did great.  It is a great choice for this kind of adventuring.  Probably my full susp GF SF100 would have been a better bike, I had plenty of fun on the mukluk.   It was also nice to discover new dirt roads and trails I had not been on before.   I can't wait to go back to explore more of this area.

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