It was  a nice sunny day in Hawley and it was the day before hunting begins. The winds had blown hard on Saturday, so I headed up early to ride the trails and clear derailer breakers from the trails. I made my way back to the parking lot just before noon and found that we had plenty of riders showing up.

We circled the parking lot for a period of time waiting for all to arrive that we were expecting. We had a total of 15 for the ride and there were other groups meeting and getting ready as well when we finally headed out about 12:15. We did  a photo op at the kiln and then headed out the first left for a warm up and out to the snowshoe. After we were all out the snow shoe I did some adjustments to Garys shifting and had him going again. Down the middle notch trail and then onwards to the stone walls. The large group was working well together and everyone was finding their place. We headed on to the root ball trail and once on here we were able to see everyone weaving back and forth through this great trail.  There seemed to be much happiness through the ranks on these winding trails, as I could hear screams of joy throughout the woods. Welll actually I think it was just Mega being her usual self and having a great time. At the end of the rootball, I had to let her know that she might be scaring the animals.

We were just over an hour into the ride, but there were some that were going to need to get back in certain time frames and our planned route for the day was going to take us well past those times. At this point 7 fo the 15 riders decided to take a shorter loop for the remainder of the ride, so off they went down the cook stove trail. Walter led them on and I am sure they all had a good ride and I have not heard of any mishaps so hopfully they all had a good ride.

That left 8 of us for the ride to the other side and onto the bag of tricks, ripper, imba, and nemba trail heading down into the revine, and then up the climb on the state police trail. Harold bent his dereailer near the top and required a little work to get going again. At this point it was after 3 pm and we decided to start heading out and on toward the Goat head trail. We did encounter hunters who were riding around either looking for deer or starting a day early, as they had their orange vests on.  Once we got rolling on the goat head, the pace went up a little and we blasted this almost all the way back, when we came across a large tree down and then Harold saw us through the woods and took a shortcut over to us. He had hurt his hip and was just wanting to find the car at this point. We all got back to the cars a little before 4 PM. What a great day of riding. I had been out since mid morning,  and then chased Matt for most the ride, so I was feeling pretty well spent myself as well as everyone else. We probably will not get as good a day as this was again this year.  Thanks to everyone who showed up for this great ride.   Mark Newton

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