Mr. Bikey: Half… or One-Third… the Bike he Used to Be

So… I met Bruce Trail again, this time in a dark alley. And he was armed. I took the trail West-ish from where it crosses Wilson near Tiffany Falls, and found out that it’s a hiking trail. Not biking. Hiking. Lots of stairs, lots of sudden steep ups and downs. Several gnarly rubbly sharp-rock gardens. I got off the bike several times, often because I lost control in technical stuff.

At this point I will note that Mr. Bikey was running on 1/3 of his gears. The front derailleur is unusable due to a stripped cable retaining screw. I hacked the thing by forcing the derailleur to stay permanently on the middle chainring. Meh. But I found out that this was not such a bad arrangement.

Eventually I wised up and got offa the psycho trail. I biked around on gravel roads until I found “Maple Woods” or something like that, with an attractive barrier that seemed to call out, “Please!  Bypass me!” So I did. It’s a really nifty series of roads and trails on the other side of the hollow from the Dundas Valley Conservation area. I asked some Slavic-accented walkers how to get to the DVCA, and they gave me good directions. Down a zippy, curvy trail into the hollow, then climb back out the other side, take the first right… and then get distracted by a little rabbit-trail singletrack climbing the hill above said first right.

The rabbit track was just that. Mostly it was a rut about 10″ wide. In or out? “In” seemed wise, since there was little choice. The trail followed a ridgeline with steep dropoffs on one or both sides much of the time, and thick vegetation the rest. The best part was a downhill section that was so overgrown with vegetation that I found myself flattened on the bike, chin on stem, branches scratching at my helmet while I tried to pilot through what felt like a very extended rabbit hole.

Then I ended up in a neighborhood in Dundas. Then I got spunky and dove back into the hollow again, on Old Ancaster Road. Then I got scared of being flattened by cars who couldn’t see around the tight corners on the no-shoulder bike-killer pavement, and I took the first trail I could find, which turned out to be Monarch Trail, which led back to the Rail Trail near our apartment. Fun!

Total time: about 1.5 to 2 hours.