Tochi's Hut

I have been biking regularly since the weather warmed up this spring. Since one of my biking friends has a racing road bike, I have only been able to go on paved pathways around the city. Toronto maintains a surprisingly large number of biking trails, so over the past weeks, we really got to explore different parts of the city.

I had always wanted to revisit some awesome mountain biking trails by Bayview and Stouffville. I used to bike on these trails a fair bit back in high school days. However, ever since they built the Bayview extension through the Oak Ridges moraine, I thought the forest along with the trails were obliterated. Apparently, parts of the trails are still around.

Today, the guy with the road bike no-showed, so AR and I decided to give these trails a try. Parked at Lake Wilcox and headed back down Bayview to the trail head. The entrance to the trail was all sand. WTF. My bicycle cannot get any traction in sand. Heading in, the trails were still more sand than dirt... sigh. After some minor climbs, we came out to this open area with some really wild sand dunes and hills. Peering in, we see some dude on a motor bike impressively tackling these dunes. No wonder there are so much sand! The thought about bringing TochiCam to catch some photos of these bikers in action crossed my mind, but that will have to wait till another day. We were here to bike, so we headed back into the forest. In any case, our bicycles stood at a disadvantage in any collisions with a motor bike. :)

Now, I'm gonna describe one of the most baffling events of my life. I've added this little hand drawn trail map to aid in my description.

We started off heading east along the BLACK path and came across this really steep hill heading NE (incline at 30ish degrees). We had to walk our bikes up the hill after which, we decided to take left branch (heading NW). We rode quite a distance through these orange-tree-like groves (I remarked how it felt like we were riding through some guy's farm). At the entrance back into the main forest, AR remarked how it seems like we should be heading West, but the sun was to our left. Since this was early morning, the sun MUST be coming from the east, so "in theory", we were actually heading south (not north west).

Adjusting our orientation, we continued down the (BLUE) path (heading real-south), which veered off the to the right (west) a bit later.  We had both expected to be somewhere to the north or west of the motorbike area, denoted by the end of the blue squiggle above.  All of a sudden, we returned back our starting location with the motor biker. WTF. The path (RED) we just came down was actually further east than our initial NE incline. Somewhere along the way, we must have looped clockwise and ended up east of our starting location, instead of looping counter clockwise as I thought. I'm usually pretty good with directions. I've never felt so disorientated or baffled in my life. The weird thing is, AR was also fooled too. It's really confusing...

After this, we picked another trail which took us to the forest area up north. We finally hit pay-dirt, as these dirt trails were more suitable for mountain biking. A lot of twists, double backs and turns, climbs and descents. We also came across the fabled abandon Chevy truck! A relic from a decade or two of abandonment.

I had a lot of trouble going up hills. I essentially had to push my bike up most of the more serious inclines. The sand and bike pushing really zapped a lot of energy out of my back. The downhill parts were really fun. It is really exhilarating to speed down hills, steering only the front wheel, and letting the back wheel bounce and fishtail behind you.

I almost wiped out once when I came across a section with multiple roots sticking out in close succession. I handled the first couple roots fine, but came into the last root at a bad angle. The front wheel got jammed and I barely bailed out in time. My right foot got caught between the handle bar and the bike frame (front wheel was twisted sideways). Good thing I was not going too fast, or else I might pull a Rich (ankle sprain) and McGregor was in serious jeopardy!

Near the north end of the forest, we came across a branch in the path. One path went down the ravine at a 45 degree drop. The other looked normal, but as we found out later, it dead-ended at some farmer's corn field. We weren't going to trespass through a corn field, so we were left with two options. Tackle the 45 degree drop down into the ravine, or go back the way we came. Ended up taking the 45 degree path (walked the bikes down). Once we got down to the bottom, we realized the paths out of the ravine all had similar 45 degree climbs up! Man. This was really bad. What ended up happening was AR scrambling up to the top. I went up as far as I can pulling each bike behind me. Handed off the bikes to AR halfway up. I was literally on my hands and knees trying to drag our bikes up. I'm really worried about McGregor now...

We biked a total of just over 15 km. My entire body is sore, I have bruises in several places and half my knuckles are scrapped. I also acquired a mosquito bite in the middle of my forehead. The journey was strenuous and the battle injuries are telling, but since I made it out in more-or-less one piece, the experience was well worth it. :-)