Snow Day

 

The weather for December has been a mixed bag. It started off with a cold weekend that was too cold to do a road ride so we ended up on the LHT trail. The LHT trail is continually being improved so its always nice to take a ride and see if anything has changed. The main change they made recently was around Rosedale park where they added a couple of bridges to get rid of some messy and dangerous parts of the trail. 

Last weekend I ended up two road rides on my own as the weather was warmed up and almost hit 60 on my Sunday ride. 

This week we got 4-6 inches of snow and after the storm it stay cold so none of us wanted to get out on the road. Laura suggested Tyler State Park and we all agreed. Tyler State Park has a series of paved paths that they keep plowed in the winter so its one of the few places that you can ride after a snow storm safely. 

It was 24 degrees when we all got there at 10am. I had my warmest gear on and once we got started it was warm enough. I have a nine mile loop around the park that we usually do twice. However once we crossed the dam over the Neshaminy Creek and headed up the hill we found that not all of the paths were plowed. We usually go down to the covered bridge but that path was still snow covered with just a couple of ruts in it from a truck that went down it. I went about a quarter mile down the snow to see if it was possible to get the bridge but turn around as it would have been an ice mess trying to get back up the hill. 

Usually we take a path that dumps us into a neighborhood and then take a path back into the park. However the path back into park wasn't plowed either so  we ended up taking side streets through the neighborhoods and a golf course to get back to a paved park path. 

While going through the neighborhoods we hear a lot of loud sirens. It sounded as it was a mass causality event but it ended up just being the local firehouse Santa parade. 

We eventually made our way back into the park paths but had to make one last detour on the local roads to get back to the start. We only have about 10 miles in so we did another small loop around the park this time keeping to the paths we knew were open. We ended up with close 14 miles and 800ft of climbing so it was a good work out. The weather looks cold for the rest of the year but I'm sure we will get a few more rides in before the new year.