V.A.S.T. Overestimation

After my really successful exploratory ride last Friday, yesterday I set out to try to burn some new tracks. The forest was opening up in the full glory of spring green, thanks in part to a pretty serious rainstorm that rolled through the night before.



The rivers were flowing. This should have been my first warning that much of what lay in front of me would be a mess. I like a mess, even when it requires that I lay my bike down in a river and move some birch trees out of the way. It's pleasant how light the low-density birch log is.

The thing that kept me out of trouble on this day is what I like to call "bounded exploration". I knew that I was heading off into unknown territory, but I also knew every road that bounded this area. In being surrounded by familiar roads, I was not completely protecting myself from getting lost -- it's still possible to go in circles in a pretty small area -- but I was at least allowing myself some freedom to roam without risk of getting totally lost.

My ride started out really nice... I took this road I have been meaning to explore that seemed like it might lead to the top of this mountain I always ride around. The road up was really well-maintained, with culverts that looked like they would be fun to fly off of on the way down. I passed a house pretty deep into the woods, probably a house used by snowmobilers during the winter.

When I reached the top of this road I reached a meadow. In the meadow was a large sign for a V.A.S.T. Trail that I am familiar with because it intersects two of my normal ride routes. This trail, "7", runs north and south. I am pretty sure that the south route goes right up the mountain, but it looked like it might be ridiculously steep, as "7" is on the other side of the mountain (that trail turned me back a few days earlier). "7" north, on the other hand, looked pretty reasonable, and I could imagine exactly where it popped out on the Old Plymouth Road.

So here's the funny thing about our imaginations and directions. Our brains love to make connections between point A and point B. If your brain has a pretty good picture of what point A looks like and a pretty good idea of what point B looks like, it is perfectly happy to fill in the gaps between the two. The problem is that imagined gap has no basis in reality. And so it was that I rode off on "7" north, convinced that it descended gently to the junction with which I was familiar.

I should have read the signs early on. As soon as I hit the V.A.S.T., the trail was quite muddy. I like mud, but this was a sloppy disgusting mess that I had to either slog through at almost no speed or simply dismount and gingerly walk over. I have ridden some pretty sweet V.A.S.T. trails during the summer over by Echo Lake, but these were not sweet at all. I guess snowmobile riders, like skiers and snowboarders, don't really care what is below the ice and snow. Let me tell you, what is beneath the ice and snow are rocks and mud: lots of them. Nonetheless I slogged on, hoping that the trail would turn down to the junction my brain had perfectly envisioned.


For awhile the trail was mostly passable, with a few ugly sections. Then it turned downhill. Downhill is a mixed blessing. Downhill when you know where you are going and don't have to come back up is great. Downhill when you don't know if you will be stuck coming up again is a bit more sketchy. Let's just say that the further downhill I got, the more nasty the trail got, and the more it became clear that the last thing I wanted to do was walk back up this mess.

And of course all the time I have in my head a perfect vision of where this trail would dump out. This vision had to be constantly altered, because with every turn I was re-imagining that my destination is around the bend. This gets old very fast, and tension starts to replace the imagination. I began to ask myself "Am I almost there, or am I getting further along on a trail that I will have to backtrack entirely?".

Then, I came to an intersection, a cruel intersection. I am a big dope for not photographing it, because it was classic. Three trails met, and a pole sat at the intersection. At the base of the pole was a crumbling mess of plywood that used to be the trail sign. And on that crumbling pile of plywood were the trail signs telling me where to go.

After a little bit of archeology, it became clear that the direction that I wanted to go was headed back uphill. No! That was not what my brain imagined when it was connecting the dots! And here is what up looked like:


Again, if you see the trail there, please point it out to me.

So I spent a long time following this trail. I walked a good half of it because it was so impassibly muddy. So many times I kept thinking that I should turn back, but I knew that would result in more walking through mud bogs. And yet the trail went on. Every time that I thought I was on the "last downhill to the junction" I found myself staring at a new uphill mess.

I had plenty of daylight and I was in my bounded area, so I never panicked... I just got a little annoyed. Eventually the terrain started to look a little more familiar, and I picked out the Old Plymouth Road in the distance. Somehow I ended up much further down this road than I had intended, so future reconnaissance work is needed in a drier season to determine exactly where I went wrong.

Not every exploration is amazing. Not every snowmobile trail is friendly to mountain bikers.