It’s been quite a season for winter cycling here in northern Illinois. I’ve been putting wheels down in the white stuff for about eight years now, but in a way I sort of feel like this season is the one where I can really say I’ve been a winter cyclist.
We’ve continually had snow cover now since the first week of January. And a lot of it - inches worth at minimum and there are parts of my yard with drifts that are several feet deep.
What this means for cycling is that I’ve been doing it in a different landscape.
Walls of Snow…
Riding our local backroads is, at times, essentially carving through canyons of snow.
We had a fairly sizeable snowfall last weekend, and between the precipitation itself and the subsequent drifting the road crews were having trouble keeping up with it all. A couple of days after our road was finally clear enough for me to strike out on. I figured I would take my favorite winter gravel route (I’ve just named it “Rocks 8” in Cyclemeter - there are so few gravel routes in there it doesn’t need to be more descriptive) and headed out.
I very shortly discovered that I was going to have to do something... different. When I got to the left turn that would take me down the first section of gravel it just... wasn’t there. I could see the house at the corner of the intersection, but the road itself was just a wall of snow - it was a little like Old Man Winter was trying to gaslight me:
Me: I thought there was a road here. I know there was - I’ve ridden it many times.
OMW: You thought that, did you? There’s never been a road here. Are you remembering other things that didn’t happen too?
That OMW - he can really be kind of a dick. But I digress.
I wasn’t super surprised that the road was covered and blocked off - that mile of road has only one house on it, and it’s not occupied, so it would be low priority. I figured I would just head another mile down and take the next road to the left. That road isn’t a gravel route, and is populated, so surely it would be open.
This was it:
Nope.
This reflected something I don’t think I’ve encountered before even out here in the hinterlands. While I wasn’t surprised the gravel road wasn’t cleared, this is a populated roadway with multiple houses on it. I was frankly stunned to see that it was still closed. Working through it mentally, I assumed that our road being cleared would be an indication that most major byways would also be open - and this has been a reliable bellwether in the past. But with the additional snow over the weekend and the prevailing northerly winds, it was clear that the east-west roadways were much harder hit.
I decided to head down and look at the next left turn, but also resigned myself to the idea that I just might wind up riding more or less straight in one direction and then turning around and coming back (which - hey! - is still a ride).
As luck would have it, that route was open. I made my left turn and hoped for the best, rearranging my route in my head. One of the upsides to living on a square-mile grid system is that this is a pretty easy thing to do (the downside is that it’s lots of very straight roads. The occasional curve can be a thing of great excitement and curiosity out here).
And I was in luck again a mile later, finding the next north-south road over to be open. And I was pretty sure the east-west road closest to home, to which this north-south road would connect, was open. Right? Right? I mean it would have stood out to me when I rode by if it had been walled off, right?
Pretty sure. Yeah.
So this meant I was a mile over to the east from where I started as I began my way back, and the east-west roadways continued to present exactly as they had on the way out. As I came to the second crossroad - the one in the picture above - it was blocked in both directions, the north-south road I was on the only opening cut through it at the intersection. After I went through the intersection I watched a full-size pickup approaching it in my mirror, and watched as he turned his blinker on and thought “nope”. Watching the truck, there was a palpable pause, and you could almost feel the driver looking at the snow packed road and calculating whether he could make it through with the truck.
He chose not to try. He chose wisely.
As I came up to the eastern end of first mile my of my Rocks route, this is what I found:
Wall of snow
The road to the right helps to illustrate what is going on - its very hard to see, but this is actually a four-way intersection. To the right the road is open - and that section of road does have an occupied home on it - but the way to the left is so covered that it is functionally impossible to know there was ever a road there if you weren’t familiar with the are.
Yup - I swear there was a road there...
And then I hear Old Man Winter again: “are you sure there was a road there...?”
Shut up dude.
As I pressed on I found, to my relief, that the crossroad nearest home was open. Well, that was partially true - and true enough for me, anyway. The approach to that intersection is downhill for a solid half mile, and on my way down I saw this:
Truck and semi
The semi would be out of place here at virtually any time of year. We do get big trucks out on the backroads here, but they are typically either agriculture or wind farm specific - grain trucks, hay trucks, and the occasional massive turbine blade trailer. This fellow is away from his home on the highway - one suspects that the operator was attempting to find his way around blocked roadways and it just didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.
I could see that it wasn’t moving - that it was stuck - but I wasn’t sure how much of the road it was covering. But the truck you see in the picture told the tale. As I came down the hill I watched it approaching from the east at a regular speed, then slow down as the driver saw the semi, then slow more, and more, and then stop. And again you could detect the period of mental calculation happening before he then performed a three-point turnaround and headed the other way.
Again - it was a wise choice:
Trike and Truck
Fortunately for me, I needed to turn left, so the truck wasn’t an issue. A tow truck arrived to pull it out as I was snapping the picture of the trike and the truck above. The driver asked if I knew of an open route to get around to the front of the truck and - at this point - I actually did. I relayed the information and headed for home.
It’s just a different world out on our backroads right now. This is something winter always offers, to some degree. The snow, when it falls, changes the view. But most winters still look like each other, year over year presenting a similar appearance. This year the increased snowfall, and the persistent cold temps over the past seven weeks have made for something novel out here in the hinterlands.
We are supposed to get few more inches of snow today, and then things warm up, with highs at or a little above freezing projected for all of next week. It won’t be warm enough to melt much, not yet, but the door does seem to be closing on this new winter world. I’m gonna try and get out into it a few more times before it’s gone.