Tuesday Night Mountain Bike Ride, September 16th, 2008 -- Cranberry Ridge Revisit

Tuesday Night Autumn Ride, September 16th, 2008 -- Cranberry Ridge Revisit

By Tom Clark

So, yeah, our first "Post Season Tuesday Night Ride" was a huge success with the three folks that showed up. It was pretty snotty weather, so no surprises there. Dave James, Geoff Orth and myself took off into a mild headwind and light rain. We'd met up at the Dog Musher's hall, and we rode up Ski Boot Hill road, then up the transmitter road (I don't know what else to call it. Sorta near the top, we took the four-wheeler trail that joins up with the ridge trail, after going up some probably-rideable climbs, but not me on that night. We pushed up the steep bits, pausing only to get mesmerized by the leaves raining off the aspens. Trippy, man.

We got on the bikes, and Geoff's bike started making a Bad Noise. It sounded like something caught in the disc brake caliper, so we yoinked the wheel off there, made sure that the caliper didn't have big chunks in it, and put it back together. It still made the noise. Took the wheel off, and took the pads out, and the little retaining spring that holds the pads in place was halfway dissolved, along with one of the pads, right down to metal. We fumbled with it a bit and decided that there was no hope for the spring. So, Geoff elected to take the front pads and put them in the rear. Good idea, but one of those pads was about dead too. Fortunately, the good one from the front mated with the good one from the back, and the spring from up front was OK too. So, a few fumbles later and we'd installed the pads in back, and Geoff was back on the trail. He was fairly cautious at first, but I think that he got pretty comfortable as the evening wore on.

We rode up the ridge to Rocky Top or whatever the hell, where we found a vehicle parked in the trail, just off the turnaround. Music coming out of it and everything. I thought that for sure we'd have another X-Rated episode to add to this collection of reports, but I didn't see anything. I struggled past the vehicle, sorta trying to catch a glimpse of live-action-porn, but the windows were a little tinted and the twilight was fading, so no luck. The dude got out of the car, and didn't seem to be hiking up his pants or anything. He apologized for the placement of his vehicle, and moved it off the trailhead. Good man.

On account of the single rear brake that Geoff now was sporting, we decided against going down the After Hours trail and went with the Secret Trail, but not before Dave and I discussed the FARTS scale again, pretty much for Geoff's benefit. He's been pretty unreceptive to this discussion before, on this very trail, so we had to haul it out again, just for him.

Here, for the first time in a public arena, is an outline of the FARTS scale:

That was originally the end of the terms in the FARTS scale, but over a year ago Dave James pointed out that a friend of his from way back would have been unfairly penalized under such a system: evidently after a night of beer drinking and eating I don't know what, dead things I guess, this guy passed a silent one that just about had Dave puking. Since it was silent, the "A" term would have been zero. "F" earned high marks since no matter where you went, there was the fart, and so did "T" because it was a genuine health hazard. Dave's friend would have scored poorly for such an effort, so something needed done.

Dave's solution was to involve a corrective term to the scale: "S" for silence. If a fart makes any noise at all, "S" is zero. If it is absolutely silent, worthy of a trained assassin, it is a ten.

So, here's how it all works. For your average "I heard that" fart, add up all the terms and divide by 40, then multiply by 10. Let's do one of my farts at work today:

Fill = 5 (pretty average big fart)
Amplitude = 6 (slightly louder than average)
Repeatability = 7 (high marks, lots of them)
Toxicity = 5 (very unpleasant, but no charges were filed)
note that Silence is zero.

Multiply 0.575 by 10 and the fart receives a five and three quarters. A solid effort, but with no real memorable qualities. Had it been silent and scored a zero on amplitude, then it would have received a ten for Silence and I would have scored higher. Damn my noisy ass!

Just a quick comment on using the scale: avoid too many gratuitous high scores. This should really be a tool to quantify a fart, not an easy way for you to rack up trophy farts. A perfect ten should probably be unattainable. Before you give a fart a "F" of ten, ask yourself if you couldn't imagine a bigger, harder to avoid fart. An "A" of ten should probably be reserved for farts that leave your ears ringing. "T" is where we all tend to get carried away. A "T" of ten should really involve pronounced human suffering. There you have it: the FARTS scale. If you use it or have comments on it, let me know. REMOVE-ALL-CAPStclark@mosquitonet.com.

The Secret trail was wonderful, and we even met up with runners Jim Brader and Andy whatshisname on the Secret Trail, and swapped stories and Sarah Palin evaluations for a while. After that, we did the usual route through the Skarland Trails, even riding on the well traveled "hey, you can't use this trail, I built this trail" trail. At Red Fox, we rode back on Red Fox, and back up to that paved road subdivision, whatever it's called. We rode past Merlin, to the cul-de-sac at the end. We found the single-track trail that we were looking for, on the north side and followed it uphill, through some switchbacks and even a weirdo, burned out seismic station with lots of graffiti painted on it out front. From there it was a straight-forward ride back to the big powerline which we followed back to Ski Boot Hill road and back to the cars. We agreed that our route back from Red Fox was better than just riding up Moose Trail, and we hope to incorporate that into next year's ride.

Fart on!