To Mt Graylock and Back: A Cyclists Story

A ~100 mile ride over two of the most difficult climbs in Massachusetts, including a 2.5 miles beast that averages over 10% grade (Whitcomb Hill to the locals), as well as a ride up the tallest peak in Massachusetts, Mt. Graylock. Not your typical Saturday afternoon, but cyclists are not your typical type of people. Sean and I had been wanting to do this ride for a little while, and once we attempted but when we were in sight of Mt. Graylock the weather forced us to head back home. Today, we would have no weather issues, there was not a cloud in the sky, so today was going to be the day!

For a ride like this I decided to bring my camera along, and because of this I put an awesome saddle bag on my seat, and it carried some tools for me! Below are a few shots of actual bike riding. You can see Sean climbing up the first climb of the day around mile 15, and below I am climbing Mt. Graylock around mile 60 or so (also included is an attempt to get both Sean and I riding along this cool river.)

On good bike rides you also come along some pretty interesting sights. For instance you can see this super cheesy store complete with a tall Native American fellow as well as a fantasticly colored metal tepee. At the top of Mt. Graylock there is a cool tower dedicated to the Veterans of Massachusetts, as well as a neat metal thingy that shows all of the mountains in the area. Sean and I stopped for pictures at the top of Whitcomb Hill, and we also had some dudes that a picture of us near the top of Graylock.

And finally no good ride is complete without a cool panoramic shot (this is a picture near the top of Graylock).

So all right, good ride so far. We climbed up two really tough climbs and the sun in still shinning. We are now planning our way backhome, and on top of Mt. Graylock meet this cool guy who gave us a good route to get back home. So we are on our way back, and we are climbing out of this valley looking for the road the guy told us to find. So we are continually going and going (we are around mile 90 at this point), and then finally we decided to look at Sean's phone which doubles as a GPS. Well what we find is that either we missed the turn the guy was telling us, or the guy sent us the "Long Way" home, the GPS says that we still have 50 miles. It is also about 5:30PM at this point and the sun likes to go down around 7:30 or 8:00. So as you imagine Sean and I start getting a little worried at this point.

Below I have included a map of out route in red (we were traveling counter clockwise), and the blue line is where we actually wanted to go on the way back. All right, so now what do we do. Well we decide that is would be stupid to turn around, and we decide to just bite the bullet and head home on our current way out of the way path. As we are crunched for time we are working pretty hard to get home on time, and lets not forget that we have been riding about 100 miles at this point. We climb two big climbs and we finally feel like we are on the home stretch. However, we look over and it says that we still have about 20 miles until we are at the point where we are half and hour back home. So this is when the phones came out and we started making phone calls to everyone we know to meet us somewhere and cart us home.

Well after about 8 calls went to voicemail without anyone picking up we just put our heads down and kept pedaling. Eventually we did get a hold of someone and they were able to meet us in Northhampton and took us back home. Seen below is Sean sitting down after we finally arrived where our ride was going to pick us up. We were extremely excited to be done riding, and as Sean is showing in the picture, we were pretty much reduced to mush.

I would like to leave you with a few quick stats. We ended up riding 127 miles (my longest ever), and actual pedaling time was 7.5 hours. We climbed just about 9,000 ft and I went through around 5000 Cal. In terms of our "wrong turn" it cost us 15 miles. It may not sound like a ton, however it would have allowed us to return back to where we started before dark, and we also would have been a little more at ease the last 2.5-3 hours of our ride.

Anyway, it was a great ride and defiantly one to remember!