Saturday was my niece’s fifth birthday party and my sister and brother-in-law luckily happen to live adjacent to Meshomasic State Forest, which happens to hold some fond riding memories from back when I was single and lived on the singletrack. I made arrangements with them to show up early, sneak a two hour ride in, and then help set up. The usual two hour ride spun itself out to a little over four hours and I came pretty close to missing the party.

Good intentions.

Before I dive into the sordid details lets lay out some facts.

• I am too reliant on technology
• I exhibit poor time management
• I am passable with dead reckoning
• I am in the best shape of my life
• Blue blazed trails are utter bullshit
• My family is exceedingly understanding

Things started off great, rolling out of their driveway at 7:30am I was maintaining a solid pace and managed to knock back a little over five miles in under an hour before my iPhone began to act up. Like every ride, I was listening to music and tracking my progress with RunKeeper, and like every ride I was taking pictures as I rolled along. At mile 5.23 I pulled out my phone to take a picture of a particularly deep, wide, and oddly green hued puddle–I’d like to point out that puddle is misleading as it struck me as being more akin to a pond. As I line up the shot my iPhone crashes, not the camera app but the OS. Black screen. Attempting to reboot it results in it crashing again.

Wonderful.

I figured I’ve got another hour to burn and my memory of Meshomasic told me that I could continue a little further then just grab a branch trail and that will get me back to the fire road. First mistake right there. All I had on me for navigation was my iPhone, which was effectively bricked, and the sun, which I had not reckoned against, well, never really.

The magenta line on the map below is how I headed off and how quickly I turned myself around. I rode out of the forest on a fire road into Portland and down a brutally long and steep road before asking a nice lady how to get back to whence I came; backtrack was the answer. The light blue line was that backtrack and a short dogleg on some sweet trail where I decided I was headed to wrong way–only to find out later when reviewing some topos that I was a mere mile from the fire road. There I made the decision to stick with the blue blazed trails.

Big mistake.

The lavender line shows the ride through some exceedingly nice singletrack along the blue blazed sections; note, I said sections. Turns out the blue blazed here is utter bullshit, a fantasy, a prank, joke, trick, and nasty snarl of go-no-where trails. The lavender line terminates after I crossed two ridges and climbed a waterfall to discover the trail disappear along with the blazes. On a high note, it was also where I was able to place one two and half minute call to my sister at 10:16am to tell her, “Yes, I am alive. No, I am not hurt. Yes, I am fucking lost.” before my iPhone died.

Upon discovering that the blue blazed trail markers where the cruelest sort of erroneous I sat down for five minutes, ate a granola bar, and gathered my wits. Then I began backtracking to where I asked myself, “Stick with good ol’ blue or go for the new and fancy yellow blazed trails.” If only I had known the truth about blue.

Hope, resignation, victory.

The orange line is the final trek back to my starting point and the leg of the journey where my emotions oscillated with the trail. Here I resigned myself to popping out in East Hampton somewhere and hoping that stranger might let my mud caked, sweaty person use their phone so I could call for a ride. It is also the leg of the ride where I repeated a mantra: “Don’t crash. Please don’t crash. Bike, don’t break either, please.” It felt like forever to reach the fire road but when I did my hopes soared. However, I was faced with a choice: left or right.

Wither the sun?

For once I was glad to have paid attention to which side the sun was on when I rode out, left, and that I paid attention to my parents as a kid when they lectured me about the degrees of movement it will take in an hour. I turned right placing the sun on my right and slightly behind me. Lucky choice? Maybe but I did not know that until I stumbled upon the nicest tattoo covered, toothless couple driving a near junked Tercel that confirmed my decision and imparted important wisdom:

“Way up there you are going to reach a T in the road. The left is downhill and the right is uphill. Go up that hill, no matter how much you want to ride down. Go right. Don’t forget, right.”

They saved me from another disaster as when I reached that T I was exhausted and my body really wanted to go left and down the hill. I would have been a disaster putting me miles and miles away from my destination.

Lessons learned.

Would I ride this again? Hell, yes, but…

• Don’t trust technology too much as it fails: would Apple just release the damn iPhone 5 already.
• Carry a damn map and compass: The journey would have been shorter if I was not relying on spotty memory and erroneous trail markers.
• Keep a level head: the trail confusion would have been worse if I panicked.