To Adventure

There's been much ado about Adventure Bikes over the past 10 or 20 years. Motorcycles that are designed to cover great stretches of pavement and dirt alike while carrying all your luggage and the kitchen sink. They are truly universal bikes.

But the truth is that any bike is an adventure bike, so long as you're having an adventure. In support of that point, on Friday I decided to take Scooty-Puff Sr on an adventure to scout out Mt Madonna road for a future bike ride.

Mt Madonna road is your standard "twisty bit of asphalt through the hills" for at least some of its length, but at a certain point when ascending from Redwood Retreat to Summit Road, it becomes somewhat less "asphalt" and quite a bit more "gravel". This also coincides with the point at which the landscape transitions from chaparral to a short stretch of oak forest before plunging into redwood forest.

And, for this trip in particular, also coincided almost exactly with sunset.

So it was that I found myself riding my motorcycle down a gravel road, with redwood trunks emerging from an abyss of darkness to my left to hold up a canopy of shadows against a patchwork of navy blue twilight, and a wall of dirt and gravel to my right to remind myself of the severity of the grade I was traversing. Whenever I dipped my bike into a corner, the meagre illumination of my headlight became a bright yet useless spot on the ground near my feet, leaving the curve ahead lost in an inky pool of blackness.

It was quite an experience indeed.

But I did find what I came for. You see, I had been told that the surface here was gravel, but it was not specified what type of gravel it was. I expected that it would either be hardpack gravel not unlike normal pavement in its consistency, or slushy gravel that would be a squirming nightmare to cross on any two wheeled vehicle. What I discovered was, instead, a continuous hardpack of washboard, which was a little bit unwelcome but not terribly disastrous. I would be able to ride up this on my road bike without issue, but descending would not be advised.

Luckily there are alternate routes off the top of Mt Madonna, so all is not lost. I think I will ride this road at some point, perhaps even over the xmas break if the weather cooperates.

In the meantime, I think Scooty-Puff got a bit of dirt on the rear wheel.