Raging River

The Cedar River at Downtown Waterloo, 6-22-14

It was maybe a month ago that I was still thinking we didn't have enough moisture around these parts. Heck, even last Sunday I was thinking the trails were really dry, and I had just ridden the "Bottoms" at Ingawanis for the first time.

I won't be doing that again for awhile!

How things change in a week's time! Now it is flooding and the Cedar River is getting close to a level I haven't seen it at since 2008 when we had an all-time record level flood here. This all means a couple of things for me and cycling around here.

First of all, obviously I won't be using many of the dirt single track trails in this area. I'll have to travel at least an hour away to get to anything dry enough to ride anytime soon. Even if we weren't supposed to be getting more rain, and the trails were clear of water, the mud and debris from flooding puts off road riding into late July, most likely, at the earliest. Parts of Ingwanis may bounce back sooner than that, but it has to quit raining all the time first.

Secondly, It means there are going to be a bumper crop of mosquitoes later this Summer. Standing water pools are almost a guaranteed fact now for the rest of this Summer. Perfectly suited for mosquitoes to hatch new younginz. It will be Fall before it gets any better in that regard, most likely. Then again, maybe I'll be wrong about that, but post the '93 and '08 floods, I recall the mosquitoes being particularly bad.

A riverside bike path sign and guard rail nearly under water.

Finally, all those things just means that gravel roads will be perfect for riding and forgetting about all the messes on the soft trails until the water recedes and the areas dry up that are affected. Plus, it will force me to travel to some places I've wanted to go to for a long time anyway, as long as they haven't been flooded as well! (I'm thinking about Minneapolis in particular.)

Happy Birthday to my Mom today, by the way!

That's probably a good thing since I need to buckle down and ride parts of the Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational course to straighten out which choices I need to make to tie in Backbone State Park into the route so folks that want to can camp. I did a preliminary route idea but it comes a few miles short of a hundred and I am going to do a modification to see if I can't bump up the mileage to over a century.

Of course, the first order of business is to get through Odin's Revenge on Saturday, then I can concentrate on the GTDRI. Looking at the forecast, we've got a great chance at a dry spell, so maybe we'll luck out and dry up by next week and some of the trails will become rideable. I just don't think that will be much of a possibility though, even with seven days of straight up dry weather, since they are saying flooding will persist on through Thursday now. But.......ya never know!