Rocks And Dirt

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 One of the things I used to write about here was my occasional trips to Texas which happened over the course of the first half of the 20 years of this blog. These were to see my wife's family and to let them spend time with my two kids. The side benefit was that I was able to ride in the Franklin Mountains which are right in the city of El Paso where my folks lived.

The "Tin Cowboy" of Conlen, Texas.

 We used to travel by car down I-35. We used Highway 54 starting in Wichita Kansas and then we'd go all the way across Kansas, diagonally through the Panhandle of Oklahoma, and the Panhandle of Texas, then diagonally, more or less, across New Mexico, and finally to El Paso on the very Western tip of the state of Texas. 

Along the way I kept seeing this tall, goofy looking statue in the Panhandle of Texas standing in a lawn in a tiny "spot-in-the-road" village. I kept trying to get an image of it, but I was either driving, it was at night, or I would miss getting the shot because we were doing 65 -70mph while I was trying to take the shot. After several missed opportunities, I finally got him in 2010. I know that is an odd story, but I think the "Tin Cowboy of Conlen, Texas" is a treasure from times gone by, and I doubt many know about this oddity. Sometimes I wonder if it is even still there....

The trail runs down the center of this image and off to the left.

Now on to things that actually were important to the blog here!

I never was successful in telling you dear readers about the difficulty in riding trails in the Franklin Mountains. It is hard to convey how different this type of riding is. The terrain is unforgiving, the heat is devastatingly hot and dry, and riding ten miles is akin to riding three times that much single track here. Oh, and if you are a flatlander, like myself, the elevation will kick your butt as well.

I did find one image, posted here, that might help portray the difficulty of riding in the Franklin Mountains. There is a trail running right down from the center of the image which sweeps off to the lower left as you look at it there. Notice the size of the rocks? They are mostly all loose, shifty, and if you go even a tiny bit off the tread of the trail you are met with nasty, pokey things called "plant life".

It was always fun, but always brutal and hard. Then near the end of my days riding there I discovered the West side of Franklin Mountain is where the fall out from the smelting plant had occurred and had altered the environment. ("Asarco - Look it up some time. It is a really sad story) It was then I realized why I never saw wildlife, much for plant life, and hardly anyone riding that side. It was all due to the decades of contamination. The one time I rode the East side was a revelation. People, flowers, animals.... Just crazy.

From the recon of Trans Iowa v6 in March, 2010

Those El Paso trips were generally taken during Spring Break. When I arrived back home, it was Trans Iowa time! I had loose ends to tie up, courses to check, and cue sheet production to take care of. It was always a busy, stressful month, month and a half, which led up to the event. 

I chose to show an image for this post which came from March 2010. It may look somewhat unremarkable to you, but this image represents a few things which were important to me for several years.

First, this recon was for our first Trans Iowa out of Grinnell, Iowa, and the city could not have been better to us. Grinnell had a special place in my heart then, and it still does to this day. We pulled out from in front of Bikes To You, the bike shop on Broad Street in downtown Grinnell,  a total of nine times before I put Trans Iowa to bed in 2018.

The second thing this image reminds me of is that it was the first Trans Iowa which I used the "Truck With No Name". The previous year was the swan song for the "Dirty Blue Box", my 1991 Honda Civic hatchback/wagon. That Toyota truck saw some really bad roads, and despite it being a two wheel drive vehicle, it always pulled me through. It was featured here on the blog several times.

I spent hours and hours plying Iowa's gravel roads in that truck. I finally let it go last year when I allowed my son to trade it in on a vehicle for himself. I'll tell ya, I got all the goody out of that truck! The dealer told me several weeks later they had to scrap the truck out because a frame rail on it was so rusted it was about to fall apart, which would have broken the truck in half!