Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Getting Back On Track and Gravel Worries

One more short work week and we're back on track. No more goofy extra curricular activities and no special holidays on the radar. (Well, for most of you,.....not for me yet. Today is my and Mrs. G-Ted's anniversary) So, back to the normal schedules and hopefully back to more news on 29"ers and such. Certainly there will be a bit more Trans Iowa V3 news coming up. I will be trying to finish off the recon of the course this weekend.

One thing is for sure, the weather doesn't look like it'll be a worry, in fact: it might be too good! With the temps in the daytime hours getting well above freezing, the sketchy gravel and "B" level maintenance roads might not be passable. I may have to bring along a bike with a computer mounted to accomodate such instances. The gravel was pretty soft and saturated with moisture from recent rains. Now with night time temperatures dipping below freezing every night, it'll take forever to dry out the roads. This means that the condition of alot of the course is expected to continue to deteriorate over the next couple of weeks. Our weather pattern is expected to remain in place for at least the next ten days.

This is highly unusual because in a normal year, the gravel roads would have been frozen solid well over a month ago now. This prevents them from getting damaged over the winter. This year, the roads have suffered a constant freeze-refreeze cycle every night. That tears up the roads something fierce. Add in a bunch of rain for the cold night time air to work with and you can see that it spells trouble.

The next couple of months will be critical for the course. We will either have an unprecedented muddy, soft, and wet course or we'll pull out of this and have somewhat "normal" conditions by late April.

This turned out to be a Trans Iowa post! Ha! That's okay I guess. After yesterday, I suppose I have gravel on the brain yet!

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