Lake Solano In The Rain

We stuck to our plan for the weekend to go on a Bigby ride out to Lake Solano, having just taken our tandem in for a major tuneup. Our target birds included hooded mergansers, Barrow’s goldeneyes, sapsuckers, and pileated woodpeckers. Our friend Barbara, taking a look at the forecast of a 40% chance of rain and showing more sense than we had, decided at the last minute not to tag along, but we still planned to meet Vance at his office on Putah Creek Road about two-thirds of the way out. Vance works for California Audubon with their landowner stewardship program and is a serious cyclist and sometime bike racer. When we arrived at his office there was a bit of drizzle but after checking the weather radar we thought it would let up soon so we carried on. I put on my raincoat at that point and was definitely happier.

We rode to the south side of the lake by which point it was definitely not letting up. Scanning from there we saw lots of common mergansers, a few hooded mergansers, double-crested cormorants, and Vance saw his first Wilson’s snipe of his Bigby. We pulled in at the boy scout camp at the southwest corner of the lake, where there had been a report earlier of a white-throated sparrow. We walked around there a bit, heard our first acorn woodpecker, and saw a couple of fox sparrows. No white-throated, and by this time it was not letting up even more.

We got back on the road, headed west to circle around the lake and stop in at the campground by the Lake Solano dam where pileated woodpeckers have been seen. No pileateds there. By this point we were wet, chilly, and 22 miles from home, so we took a bit of shelter under the eaves of a campground building while eating lunch of half a peanut butter sandwich and a mandarin orange. We then headed off on the five-mile run to the town of Winters for a chai latte and a hot chocolate at Steady Eddie’s. It actually let up by that point.

Thus warmed we headed east on Putah Creek road home. It wasn’t raining much at all by then, and we were moving at a good clip, but soon the fact we hadn’t ridden that far in quite a while caught up with us, and we limped our way into Davis, laughing our way through the final downpour the last mile. We got in the door at 3 PM after riding about 43.75 miles, and immediately headed for the hot shower.

New Bigby species for me included:
Hooded merganser
Oak titmouse
Wild turkey
Hermit thrush
Fox sparrow
Spotted towhee
Pacific-slope flycatcher
Acorn woodpecker

The Journey Is Half The Fun

The tandem went in for a tune-up today. This Bigbying means we have many miles to cover!

Birding is often not an activity that gets you lots of exercise. Frequently the pattern is to drive for a couple hours, and then only walk several hundred yards away from the car to see the birds. Doing a Bigby reverses that pattern. If we actually manage to get a mountain quail on our Bigby, we will have had to have ridden at least 50 miles round trip and then either cycle or hike up towards the top of the Vaca Mountains. Bird or no, it makes for quite an enjoyable trek.

Bigby By Tandem?

A birder in Québec named Richard Gregson recently came up with the idea of doing a Big Green Big Year, or Bigby for short: that is, seeing as many bird species as possible in a year without driving or flying. There are three categories, the walking Bigby, the self-propelled Bigby (walking, cycling, or canoeing), and the public transport Bigby (also adds travel by bus and rail). Today we took a little 13-mile tandem ride, and seem to have gotten started on a self-propelled Bigby, seeing 32 species over the day.

This will be a good way to get in shape. Significantly different habitats from where we live are a long way off (e.g. twenty-five miles each way to the hills). The ideal town to do this in is probably Santa Barbara, where we used to live many years ago, since it’s only a few miles between the 4200’ high Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That is the reason why the Santa Barbara Christmas Bird Count consistently is one of the top several counts by species numbers.

The public transport option is quite favorable for us, though. The combination of Amtrak train, bike, and bus can get one all over California. It doesn’t end up being very frugal, however.

[Added by Pica, 1/2/08: The running list of our BIGBY is in the sidebar of Bird by Bird . The champion BIGBYs as far as I can tell, so far, are the Yukon-to-Florida-or-bust-by-bike team, Malkolm and his parents Wendy and Ken ]

Shadow of Pink Chocolate

A long day for us — we volunteered as radio hams for a new bicycling event along the American River Parkway called the Princess Promenade. This event was designed to encourage women and girls to ride confidently along the 32-mile long bike trail which runs from Old Sacramento to Folsom Lake. There were three options to the ride — a little five-mile jaunt, a thirty-mile round trip, and finally a sixty-mile round trip doing almost the entire length of the trail.

Pica’s role was as a shadow for the event organizer Janaé — she kept Janaé in communication with the radio base station at the start/finish point. My job was to patrol one section of the route as a bicycle mobile ham. I started off with the little jaunt to the east and then made three trips from the start/finish down to the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, covering about 30 miles total. The last such run was to shepherd the tail-end rider home, who turned out to be a celebrity, the reigning Mrs. California. The story was she’d hadn’t been on a bike since age 15 or so but heard of the event some weeks back and decided to do the 60-mile option. She had no trouble completing it either.

Pink was definitely the color theme of the event. Pica was dressed in the pink t-shirt given out for the ride, a pink child’s tiara she picked up yesterday, plus her radio headset. Along the way she got ‘blinged’ with a sprinking of glitter. At the start/finish there was also the most decadent thing I’ve ever seen, a chocolate fountain. Many baskets of strawberries were consumed as dipping material. Those things must be the devil to clean, though.

Paths Marked In Green

I rode into town via campus this afternoon, eventually headed to Community Park to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform here on their annual visit to Davis (especially noteworthy this time were the portrayals of Dick Cheney and Condelezza Rice), and saw markings on the campus paths that were definitely not here on Friday. A green stripe, the words “Davis Bike Loop”, and another green stripe. I didn’t follow them — I am too immersed in a book on Faerie to trust where such signposts might lead.

Davis Double Century 2007

Yesterday we spent the entire day providing radio support for the Davis Double Century, a 200-mile bicycling event. Here is an account. (Photo at left is by Dutch Martinich.)

Prelude: Friday evening proved to be more hectic than planned. In the afternoon, one of Pica’s coworkers spotted some kittens under a trailer building near where Pica works. They proceeded to try to catch them. By the time Pica left work, three of the four were in captivity, with a live trap set out for the fourth. We returned after dinner to find the fourth kitten in the trap. The kittens went off to the house of Pica’s boss for over the weekend, and happily it looks like all four will find homes. But the episode with the kittens delays our packing for the day by a bit, adding to our usual disorganization.

2 AM. Pica notices that the dome light in Nellie, our Honda Element, is on. It would be seriously bad news if the car doesn’t start, and she goes out to check. It’s okay.

4 AM It’s time to get up. Charlie nudges me awake (it’s breakfast time, silly human) ahead of the alarm. We need to head out early because we are the radio support at the first rest stop.

Crisis. We set out for Rest Stop 1 at 5 AM, powering on the mobile transceiver in Nellie. At 5:15 AM, we hear over the radio a report from the ham operators heading up to Rest Stop 2 which is at Monticello Dam on Lake Berryessa. There is a fire in the canyon, and no traffic being allowed through. Our 750 riders on the road suddenly have no place to go. We know the ride director back at start/finish is now in high decision-making mode, and we await instructions. At 5:32 we are approaching Rest Stop 1, and we get the announcement over the air all riders are to halt at that stop. At the moment we arrive the folks at RS 1 know none of this, and we immediately leap into informing them. A few riders have already passed the rest stop, but not many, and the rest stop soon fills up with impatient and chilly cyclists.

The word comes of the alternative plan, reverse the route. This followed by the adopted variant — turn the ride from a loop into an out-and-back ride, heading north up the Capay Valley, ending up in the hills of Lake County, and then returning the same way. There are massive amounts of logistics to sort out to accomplish this shift, and the riders are still instructed to hold.

An hour later the riders are released, and the rest stop soon clears out. Once everyone is out we change our mission and start driving north as a sag support vehicle.

Tail-end Charlie. Since we were at the rest stop until it closed, all the riders are now in front of us, and it is now our lot to keep track of the final rider. This is rider number 181, who seems particularly geographically challenged, and we have to redirect him twice to get him up to the highway headed up the Capay Valley. He would get lost at least one more time over the course of the ride.

Personal Mishap. We drive up the Capay Valley looking for stray riders, and arrive at the now-relocated Rest Stop 2. Very few riders need a sag at this point, but we see one rider who has enough and decides to ride back to Davis. What’s his rider number? I chase after him on foot, shouting. Then running to the rest stop over uneven but flat ground I somehow lose my balance and fall, but wind up in a quite well-executed roll. (When I was a little kid I took some tumbling classes and practiced those sorts of falls. I must have retained the muscle memory.) I am unhurt except for tweaking my side a bit.

Extremely Bad Karma. We continue to sag northward. Over the radio we hear that a tandem is getting a privately-provided sag further up the course by a black Honda. Private sags are absolutely not allowed on this double century because of the potential for confusion and traffic hazards, and when one of our patrol vehicles catches up with them, they are disqualified.

Nevertheless, they continue to ride from rest stop to rest stop, refueling themselves on the way. Pica later in the afternoon glares at them, says “oh, you’re the renegade tandem couple”.

As it turns out that not only are they having private sag support, only one of them has registered for the ride, thus cheating the bike club out of $120, the per-person entry fee. They get their comeuppance at the very end. Pica recognizes them as they try to get their ride dinner at the finish point, fetches the ride director, who promptly chews them out and boots them out of the building.

[Not] In The Air. Our radio support task is greatly facilitated by having an airplane (“Air One”) flying up about 5000’ serving as an airborne repeater. In the deeper canyons of the ride there is no other way to get a decent radio signal to the sag vehicles. Several of the local hams are pilots and take turns flying. We are headed south towards Davis with a couple of sagged passengers, and drive past the county airport, just after when Air One has set down for refuelling. Pica notices a plane landing funny. She doesn’t see this, but in fact this plane goes off the end of the runway. Nobody is hurt, but flight operations at the airport are halted for 45 minutes, and our airborne repeater is stuck on the ground for that time.

Wedding. We find out that there is another bicycle event going on that is sharing part of the course and even a rest stop. This is the Northern California AIDS Challenge, whose 60 riders have raised $120,000. Since our double century has turned into an out-and-back ride, our old friend Rest Stop 1 is also the penultimate Rest Stop 9. On our second trip out this day we stop there and see a mock wedding party going on at Rest Stop 9, with three guys in white wedding dresses behind a nice-looking cake. This is part of the festivities for the AIDS challenge ride. In fact we run into a friend of ours, Joaquin, at the stop who is riding that ride.

Heartfelt Sag. It 5 PM and we are at Rest Stop 7, 65 miles from the finish. We want to start making our way back to Davis — we are tired and have kitties to feed. The thought is that we can sag in riders further along the course as we head “Davisly” (using the term coined by one of the net control operators). We head south, and are in the Cache Creek canyon area when we get a call from net control asking if we can sag a tandem that is on the other side of Rest Stop 7. It is not the direction we want to be going, but okay. There is no other vehicle that can sag a tandem in the vicinity.

Our Honda Element has two nice tricks — the rear seats can fold up against the walls and the gear shift is mounted on the front panel rather than the floor. Amazingly, this allows one to fit a tandem entirely inside if one takes the front wheel off and slides the front of the bike between the front seats, the fork just touching the front of the interior. One can’t carry the tandem’s passengers that way, but another sag can and would take them.

Several miles west of Rest Stop 7 we spot the tandem, with the other sag already there. It’s the little girl. At the beginning of the day at Rest Stop 1 we were endeared to see a dad captaining a tandem with his seven-year old daughter as the stoker. She was delighted to be on the bike.

But she had gotten tired. By that point they had just finished a metric double century — 200 kilometers. The girl was quite chipper though, and still wanted to finish the ride under their own power, so the plan was to take them to Rest Stop 9 and see how they felt then. The photo at top shows us all on the trunk of Nellie.

We reconvene at Rest Stop 9. Still tired, they stop to grab munchies, and we start sagging them the twenty miles left to Davis. At the first turn, the other sag vehicle honks us over. The girl wants to ride the final mile into the finish line. Well, we can arrange that, and once in Davis, I locate a suitable spot for them, and we stop. They reassemble the tandem, and ride off, arriving at the finish line to considerable applause.

Bird list. Pica contributes the following list of birds seen throughout the day:

Canada goose
mallard
wild turkey
California quail
great egret
cattle egret
black crowned night-heron
white-faced ibis
turkey vulture
white-tailed kite
northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Swainson’s hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
American coot
killdeer
black-necked stilt
American avocet
gull sp.
rock pigeon
mourning dove
Eurasian collared dove
barn owl
great-horned owl
black swift
Anna’s hummingbird
Nuttall’s woodpecker
northern flicker
black phoebe
western scrub-jay
yellow-billed magpie
American crow
common raven
rough-winged swallow
cliff swallow
barn swallow
American robin
northern mockingbird
European starling
western tanager
lazuli bunting
red-winged blackbird
tricolored blackbird
western meadowlark
brewer’s blackbird
Bullock’s oriole
house finch
house sparrow

Sag 10

We’ve received our assignment for helping out with the radio communications during the Davis Double Century 200-mile bike event, which is two weeks from this Saturday. First, we’re off to run the radio station at Rest Stop 1 at the bright and early hour of 5:30 AM. That’s all right, we’ve had plenty of practice of getting up at oh-dark-thirty during our Colorado trip. We then change gears, go mobile, and start following the course, having turned our Honda Element into a radio-equipped sag wagon (“Net control, this is Sag 10.”), and finishing our duties around 5 in the afternoon. A long day, but hardly as long as what the riders end up doing.

Another Bicycling Contraption

When you live in a town as sopped in bicycle culture as this one, you run into a lot of contraptions. (Lila was one of these, getting me through a tough spot when I’d had my Achilles reattachment surgery.)

Today at the Coop we saw a tricycle that had five 12-volt batteries apparently powered by a battery charger that was attached to the wheel rotation up front. (Like Lila, this trike had two wheels in front, one behind.) The owner came out while we were admiring his bike: he had just returned two kegs from a party the night before. The bike was his master’s thesis. He was in the department of Mechanical Engineering but had a lot of help from the Technology and Transportation folks.

I had no camera with me but happened to have a sketchbook in my pocket. It gives no sense of the multiple electrical cables or the perspex divider between the front and cargo section which doubles up as a tandem spot. (Our young friend said there was also a roof which wasn’t attached because it was 75 degrees today, sorry those of you in chilly climes.)

Day Of Accomplishments

Yesterday we were busy — I helped break a world record and Pica passed her ham radio licensing exam! The world record was for the longest bicycle parade. The previous record was 614 bikes; we ended up with 913 bikes in the parade. The parade was organized by the UC Davis undergrads on the occasion of the final home basketball game of the season. It started off at the track and old football stadium on the east edge campus and wended its way a couple of miles through campus to end up at the basketball pavilion. It took us about a half-hour to get us out of the track leaving single file, and we moseyed along at maybe 7 miles per hour. The mayor of Davis officiated at both the start and finish, and there were cheerleaders en route.

Meanwhile, Pica was taking a one-day ham radio class sponsored by the Yolo Amateur Radio Society with a licensing test at the very end of the day. The class consisted of a grueling series of videos, and the exam was 35 questions multiple-choice. She passed, and in a week or so will receive her official call sign from the FCC!

Prosthetics For Bicycles

One of the local bike shops we frequent was running a special on tuneups, so we both took our commute bikes in a couple weeks ago for the work. No problem, but I quickly learned that my bike needed a whole lot of parts to be replaced, and the whole enterprise cost me about 5 times as much as I was expecting.

This of course begs the question — at what point when you replace part after part, do you have a different bicycle than when you started? I think the answer is when you swap out the frame.