Joey Mac: Alternative Routes

Riding the same route to work every can become dull, I like to spice it up every once in a while with a alternative route. From my apartment, there are really only a couple of roads that go to my company campus, but I have found a couple of off-road options that are pretty fun, and gives me a reason to ride the mountain bike to work. I found this one a while back (while there was still snow on the ground!):

I start off by going east down pine, past this park with this pond. Back in those trees there is an adventure trail complex that is accessible from Birch street.

I guess youth groups come here in the summer for team building exercises. There were things like wooden walls to climb and rails to walk across (I didn’t get pics of that stuff).

This bridge crosses a narrow point in the pond, and leads to more adventure (trails). The other side comes out on a soccer complex on the main road I normally go to work. I can go that way or back through the trails and get to work down birch.

Another route:

These power lines run along the crest of the hill behind campus. I tried riding there from this point near my house (after a healthy climb up the hill). This part of the trail is pretty rough, so I gave up and looked for a different point to jump on. I found it on Redstone Hill Road:

This isn’t some sort of public multi-use path or anything, it’s obviously a service path for the powerlines, but I could tell that people had brought bikes and atv’s through here before.

Eventually, I emerged from the trail, behind campus, next to the satellite farm. But there’s a fence there!

To keep me out or to keep the satellites in? I guess I could have assumed I couldn’t get through this way, but wanted to try. I ended up going around the satellite farm.

I found a weird little trail that cuts off from the powerline trail through the woods next to the satellite farm, with religious markers nailed to the trees, as well as a statue and big cross in a clearing…

The trail took me out to the main road, right next to campus. I couldn’t find anything there that marked it or gave any indication that there was a trail there. Weird.

on campus, the other side of the satellite farm, they look so little from down here. Campus is actually pretty nice to ride around.

I work on the 3rd floor of the building you can see over the parking lot. And here is a legless coyote:

They’ve installed a few of these around campus to help scare away the geese that take over campus every summer. I don’t think the geese are fooled though, there were definitely still some geese hanging around about 20 feet away.

A bike rack conveniently located right outside my building. The Univega road bike on the left and the Roadmaster mtb on the right have not moved since I started three months ago, and probably several months before that. The wheels are flat and the chains are rusty. But that Trek just started showing up in the last couple of weeks since it got nice. I am no longer the only bike commuter on campus! Hopefully more soon, with bike-to-work week coming up, I have a friend who is helping to push it as a company-wide initiative.

Anyway, I hope that if you ride to work every day, you can find at least one or two fun alternative routes to get there, and live it up!