Snowy Hook

 

When there is more than a couple of inches of snow on the ground it is hard to find a place to ride. Once the roads are plowed you can try to ride on them but between the reduction of the width of the road and possibility of hitting patches of ice its not very safe. Riding on the trails around us is not an option either because anything over an inch or two is usually two slushy or icy to be ridable. At times like these I use to go to Tyler State park or Pennypack Park because they plow their paved paths so it use to be possible to ride there after a snow storm. This winter, as we found out in December, they don't seem to be plowing the paths. When we went to Tyler State park in December only about half the paths were plowed. 

It was going to be 40 degrees on Saturday so I wanted to find some where to ride. I decided to head towards the shore as it hadn't snowed as much there so my thought was that some of the paths and roads might be ridable. I headed for Sandy Hook and got Jack, Laura, Pete and Ricky to join me. I was going to try and ride part of the Henry Hudson trail and if that was too snow covered to ride then I was just going to ride around the roads of Sandy Hook.

As I was driving up to Sandy Hook there was less snow but more than I thought there would be. Laura showed up with her new gravel bike which she miraculously found after only a couple of weeks of starting to look for the bike.

 

Its a Cannodale Topstone and this was its first ride.  

We headed over the bridge to the other side of the bay to get on the Henry Hudson trail. It's a nice trail that goes along the coast line for a few miles before heading inland. When we got to the trail it was a little more snow covered than expected.

It had been packed down by people walking on it. I rode in a half a mile for a picture hoping it would get better but it didn't so I turned around. I'm sure it would have got better by the Marina but it would have been hard to get there. 

We headed back to Sandy Hook stopping at a few places to get a view of the bay. Once back on the Hook we meandered around the roads stopping for pictures at some of the beaches. There was a observation deck at the north beach where we got some good pictures of New York. It was one of the clearest days I have seen at Sandy Hook. (Click on the picture below to zoom in)

It was in the mid 40s and sunny so we were relatively warm and didn't mind random exploring the different places in Sandy Hook. It has been a few years since we went this far in to Sandy Hook. We even went to a few places I don't normally go but it was fun just looking around. There was a stiff west wind that was mostly a cross wind so it didn't really slow us down but did occasionally pelt us with sand in a couple of spots. 

We ended up spending about two hours riding around and ended up with a little over 20 miles. It was fun winter outing and a good way to get a ride in.