Mount Tom, Holyoke, Sugarloaf

Scratch that. No Sugarloaf. In my never-ending quest to make sure that no one will ever agree to accompany me on a ride, I came up with the following route and conned Dave B. into going with me: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/3111979

The plan was to hit Mount Tom first, but take an alternate route looping down via Easthampton Road, and around Whiting Reservoir. Dave probably had his first clue that I didn’t have my shit together when we turned onto Fort Road and it quickly became dirt. Not problem, however, since I was riding my cross bike with road tires (25s) and Dave had a cross bike (for gearing, primarily) and cross tires.

The first hill of the day was the west side of Reservation Road that climbs up the to the western entrance to Mount Tom Reservation. I’ve done the eastern approach before and assumed this would be similar. A few meters after turning onto the road, however, I wondered what the sign about “No through traffic” meant. Hmm…ignore it. After climbing on pavement for a little while, we came to a gate followed by what looked like a messy gravel road. Checked with Dave to see his opinion, he said he was game to give it a try. For about 1/4 mile it was fine. It became clear that there once was a paved road here, since there were many small-to-medium patches of pavement mixed in with all the gravel. Then we got to the part pictured at the top of the post with huge ruts that were not navigable on a road bike, at least not for me. Options were to turn around (and risk flats descending on the gravel) or hike the remaining portion, which I estimated to be about 1/4 mile. We chose the latter. At the top, we rode through the park to 141 and then took a left into the Whting Reservoir. More gravel, but this was nice and smooth. Lots of hikers and recreational walkers, so we took this nice and leisurely.

Then for the main attraction. Mount Tom. For the first time I went into the climb not being particularly afraid of it, but with a nagging suspicion that I should be. My previous best on Strava (though probably slower than the time I did it with a 34-29) was 12:01, and I was hoping to crack 10 minutes today. In the end I only managed to shave a minute off and got to the top at 11:01. I was hoping the Strava comparison would be more useful in seeing if I went out too hard today or anything, but my time today gained pretty gradually and consistently over the whole climb. In any case, I felt good for the first half, but had to fight the urge not to stop for a breather through the entire last section. The road surface, by the way, already bad, has deteriorated significantly since last time. Dave made it up without walking but had to stop a couple times.

No more dirt-road drama after this point, though we did take the dirt southern approach to Mount Holyoke, but that actually makes the climb slightly easier than taking the more northerly road up from Rt. 47. After that, the plan was to ride up the eastern side of the CT river to Sugarloaf, but given all the dirt (and Dave had a flat early on) we were already at over 3 hours for ride time, and I was already thinking about Korean food in Hadley, so we ditched the last part of the ride when we got back to Hadley.