Tuesday, August 28, 2018

KG2.5 Gravel Road Ride

KG2.5 gravel road ride. We had a good group and some fantastic weather to head out and explore some old coupled with some new. Starting out from South Kirby we made our way to East Burke along the scenic ridge and then switched over to Darling Hill. The group followed that ridge line to Burke Green and then Maple Ridge up through Newark but along the way I mapped out an off shoot that I'd never done. 

On the map it looked like it went through so I gave it a try. Much of the route, out around a small pond, was a nice back road, which gradually narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed until we were on old logging roads that were wintertime snowmobiles trails. After some wrong choices and indecision as the GPS tracks didn't match with the actual ancient path remnants in the woods we started coming out to more traveled path that opened into a clearing which brought us to more established trail that got us to old road that brought us back to the main road. Eventually we made our way back to the primary road and shortly descended down to RT114 which we followed into Island Pond.

In Island Pond we made a welcome stop for lunch to fuel up before heading East along RT105, which was nice wide rolling pavement with very little traffic. Eventually we made out way to the remote, gravel South America Pond Rd which we were on for about ten miles. This was a great section of remote forest access road that saw little use and even less traffic, pretty much giving us the road to ourselves along the entire stretch, which did a fair amount of climbing. This eventually brought us back down through forest to connect into some of the same areas that we visited for the Kingdom Graveleur 2.0 ride. 

We may very well see some of this terrain on next summer's KG3.0 ride. I'm still working on that final route though.

Anyhow a great ride with some hearty exploration on a fabulous late summer day with wonderful sights and great folks.