Bike shots

I take a lot of trail-side pictures of whatever bike I happen to be riding. I often ride by myself, and if there's photographic evidence that my bike was somewhere, that means I was there, too. It helps me remember the places I've been. I will occasionally take a selfie, though I usually refrain on the grounds that's it's an inane Gen-Y term for an equally inane Gen-Y activity.

Here are some of the bike photos I've taken over the last couple of months in and around Anchorage, Alaska.

Here's a standard profile, taken near a trail map, a sad lost-dog flyer, and warnings about the dangers of moose cow-calf pairs and aggressive hawks. The pictures are almost inevitably of the drive side of the bike. My drivetrain gives me very little trouble whereas disk brakes, over on the non-drive side, are a never-ending source of squeaks, howls, scraping noises, and adjustments. Why would I want to have a picture of those damned infernal rotors and calipers?

No sooner had I said all photos were of the drive side of the bike than in sneaks a front-quartering, non-drive-side view. 

Another trail sign. Drive-side or not, the bike needs to be facing the right because this was July 5th, a counter-clockwise day on the Bolling Alley Trail. Portrait orientation is employed less frequently than landscape. If the snow-white frame seems overexposed, it is, but only because it was exceedingly sunny that day. The clear skies didn't last through the entire trip, as you'll see.

This is my bicycle back at my Anchorage apartment. This wouldn't ordinarily be something worth taking up space on an SD card for other than it was snapped after a 32-mile ride, the longest I've ever done on a singlespeed. I am irritated by the fact that I am visible in the reflection in the window 

Another standard side view. I had been photographing some mushrooms up close and inadvertently left the camera on the miniature special-effect setting. It looks kinda' cool, but it also made it hard to tell that the rock is a giant sphere.

Mixing it up a little with the bike climbing a little rise all by itself.

Now I'm really mixing things up. I'm back with the portrait orientation and now, the bike is on its side. I wanted to make sure I got the cloud-shrouded foothills of the Chugach Mountains in frame and, to be fair, there was nothing on which to prop the bike in the muskeg anyway. 

Portrait of my bike leaning on really the only large rock (not including the big stone sphere, above) that I saw in the whole area in which this was taken. 

Distant, nearly head-on shot. If this isn't a trailblazing departure from my typical bike photo, I don't know what is. Actually, I was more interested in showing a section of the kind of singletrack I'm going to miss when I get back to the linear rock piles I ride on back home in Tucson.

This is the bike photo-bombing yours truly in a "me-peg" (a jpg of me?, is that better than saying "selfie"?). I'll also miss this sort of cool, misty, late-August weather back in Tucson. 

And finally, here's my mountain bike on my apartment balcony just moments ago. I don't know which way it's actually facing in there, so I can't tell if we're looking at the drive or non-drive side. The wheels are off and the chain is in a baggie, so there's not really a drive-anything right now. The wet pavement in the background, and the forecast for more of the same right through my departure date, is why I went ahead and boxed it up.

In my two months in AK, I managed around 135 miles of riding on, over, under, and/or through, as the case may be, pavement; wooden bridges; trails both wide and skinny; roots, moss, and mud; low-flying, partially-fallen trees; dog shit; hobo camps; and three or four small rocks. I rode the Coastal Trail along Cook Inlet; the Chester Creek Greenbelt; the gravel-strewn, terrifyingly bike-hostile streets of Spenard; the sweet, flowing singletrack of Kincaid Park; and the surprisingly kick-ass social trails I found mixed in with the Anchorage Pacific University cross-country ski trail network. I even got momentarily - and inexplicably - lost in downtown Anchorage early in my stay. This was perhaps fitting, because I had just retrieved my bike from a TSA-driven SNAFU in which it was momentarily lost. Despite the melancholy tone of today's prior blog post, I really have had an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience up here. In fact, it was so awesome overall that I am now officially over and done with the SSWC 2014 debacle.