It started on my Black Friday ride. I was rolling down the street to the trailhead, picking up a bit of speed, so I shifted up. And… nothing.
Feet spinning on the pedals just as quickly as they were a moment before, no additional effort, no additional speed. I clicked forward another notch and was rewarded with exactly the same I amount of nothing for my attempt.
When I reached the trailhead I stepped up off the trike, lifted the rear wheel off the ground a bit, and cycled thru the gears. Or, perhaps I should say, I attempted to cycle thru them. With each click the rear derailleur simply refused to move, as if to say “you know, it’s a national holiday - I want the day off”.
I was having this conversation with my derailleur - which speaks, of course, in a French accent, and periodically injects expressions like “mon dieu!” and “omelette du fromage” into the conversation - on the Ridgeway entry point to the Military Ridge Trail in Southwestern Wisconsin. After a year off due to the pandemic, we had returned to our tradition of gathering at my sister-in-law’s for the holiday. That tradition, for the past few years, has included bringing along my trike to ride this particular trail.
Looking more closely at what was going on, I could see that the shifter cable was not moving with the lever - it was, in fact, unseating and remaining behind when I moved it forward, sticking out the back side of the lever. And I was stuck on the lowest gear.
I looked back over the drive up to Ridgeway - a two and a quarter hour drive northwards from our Homestead - and remembered that, for much of it, we were driving thru varying levels of fine snowfall. For this trip, the trike had traveled on the roof of the Outback, the inside of what is usually the mobile trike garage being selfishly taken up by my wife and child and our personal paraphernalia (they are obstinately unwilling to ride on the roof).
Now, the trike has been snowed on while on the roof before - most notably on our last holiday trip up to Ridgeway in 2019. But in that case, it was overnight, while the trike was stationary, and it was a real snowfall - actual flakes, not the fine, misty-ish stuff we were encountering on the ride up this time. So, it seemed that the combination of the snow type, and the fact that we were driving thru it, conspired to drive moisture into the shifter line and freeze it up.
Having limited resources in the moment to do anything about it, I played with the front shifter and found that I could, in fact, move between the three front rings. So I resolved to proceed with a much more limited gear set - initially three, well spaced gears, but I also found that if I massaged the exposed portion of the rear shifter cable a bit at the lever I could sometimes get a single gear change out of it. So technically I was riding an occasional six-speed trike.
Military Ridge is a slow trail anyway - the surface is nominally crushed limestone, but one has to use one’s imagination to see where or when that limestone might have been placed. Sand is mostly the order of the day on this trail, solidified a bit by the freezing temperatures, but still very soft. Given that, lower gears are where I would have been in any case, so I decided to ride on.
I managed to make it from Ridgeway to the Blue Mound State Park entrance with this approach - a little over 9 miles in one direction, and of course I had to ride back. In fact, I had my highest average trike speed ever on this trail despite the gearing handicap. This owed to below-freezing temperatures hardening up the trail - on my previous adventures it was above that line on the thermometer, softening the trail and impacting progress. And it was those temperatures, and not the gearing issue, that actually got me to turn around at Blue Mound. I’d packed my cold weather gear based on my prior experiences here, and as a result my hands and feet were getting uncomfortably chilly.
When I got home I put the trike into the mobile trike garage and let the car run a little while to warm it up, and then stored both in the garage. Ahead of my next ride I got it out and ran thru the gears to test this, and it all shifted just fine. I figured the problem was resolved, and sure enough everything was fine for the next three rides.
Then, on ride four, the problem showed back up. As I tooled out of my driveway I shifted up and - you guessed it - nothing.
And looking back at those three prior rides, the ones that had assured me all was well? All of them were above freezing (seriously: 55° (F) in December in Northern Illinois? - I’m not complaining, but it is weird).
I popped on to the Winter Cycling group on Facebook, figuring that if any group of people would have encountered this issue, this would be it. Indeed, my request resulted in a number of suggestions, ranging from warming it up to using WD-40 to replacing the cable and housing to one gentleman’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that I switch to wireless shifters.
I’d already tried warming it up, of course (which I did not mention in the post), and any glance through the maintenance-related posts herein will demonstrate that I’m always going to err towards the fix that gets me back on the road the quickest. And I always have WD-40 in the garage, so…
Thing is, it worked! I’ve had one below-freezing ride since (it’s still a weird December, and we are almost two-thirds of the way thru), and had access to all of my gears. I will probably eventually replace the cable - either take a shot at it myself or have the LBS do it at the next tune-up. But that’s a ways out yet. In the interim, I may consider bringing the can of WD-40 along with me for rides in case the problem recurs.