Schooley's Mountain

The ride up Schooley's mountain is one of the hillier rides we do and definitely a challenge. I always wait a few months into the season to do this ride so I can get some hill training in. Originally this ride was suppose to be Saturday but we finally got some rain so I postpone the ride to Sunday. This meant that I had a small group just me Laura, Mike M and Jeff which was fine with me.

As we headed towards our climb up Rockaway Rd. Mike stopped to check his rear derailleur because he was having problems shifting to his lowers gears. When we got to the top of Rockaway Mike checked his gears again and found the problem. His rear derailleur cable was broken at his shift lever. We tried to see if we could fix it but there was no easy fix with out a new cable so we tied the cable off to one of the cable guides so that Mike was stuck in his next to lowest gear. This meant that he went from 27 speeds to just three. He could basically only shift his front derailleur. We thought about finding a bike shop but couldn't find one that was close and open.

Even with a slightly disabled bike Mike keep powering up the hills. I actually felt a little guilty every time I made a shift.

We slowly made our way mostly uphill to Califon where I took a few new roads to get around the backside of town and started the last climb up to Schooley's Mountain.

Once on top of Schooley's we cruised a few miles to our rest stop in Long Valley. There is an old general stop and post office with a nice picnic table that make a good place for a break.

After the break, single gear Mike took off to Hackettstown to meet his wife and the rest of us headed down hill back to the start. We did have a good down hill on Four Bridges Rd. and a few other places but was disappointed with the downhill on Black River Rd. Black River Rd use to be one of my favoritesa couple of years ago but the road has become so rough and strewn with potholes that it's not much fun.

Of course it wasn't all downhill. We climbed over 1500 feet on our way back to the start. The climbs on the way back weren't as bad as the climbs up to Schooley's Mountain but it was a hot and humid day and we were getting tired. On the bottom part of Four Bridges just before we got to Tanners Brook there is a tough little climb that had Laura telling how much she hated me.

We did get a few nice views on the way back and stopped to take the picture at the top of this post at the corner of Doolittle and Hackelbarney(You gotta love the road names in NJ). You can see more picturesfor the ride here. By the time we got back to the start we were pretty tired but were still glad we did the ride. This is definitely one of the tougher rides we do and but it is good to occasionally push yourself close to your limits to keep improving. I have included a profile of the ride with some stats to show how much climbing we did. Jeff had a Garmin and sent me the stats after the ride. His stats were about 100 feet lower than mine but its still close so it's good to have independent conformation that my legs have a right to feet bad after climbing over 4000 feet.

Click on the profile below to get see a larger view