Welcome to the Tuesday Dirt and Pavement Ride!

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Welcome to the first Dirt and Pavement Ride of the 2018 season!

D+P Rides will be multi media adventures. We will seek and link together dirt roads, paved roads, rail trails and recreation paths. The goal is a scenic, fun, low or no traffic ride.  This will not be a mountain bike ride with technical single track. There may be some places where we might have to walk our bikes due to soft sand, rocks or washouts, but the goal is to enjoy mixed surface roads and the interesting routes that they allow us to create. 

What bike to use? It is all about your tires: Tire Size Matters. The tire should be efficient on pavement but stable on dirt roads. Road bikes with wider tires or mountain bikes with smoother treads will work well. Use a hybrid, gravel bike or randonneur with a tire width that allows you to enjoy exploring these roads without worrying about the road surface conditions. Cruise happily from pavement onto the dirt and visa versa.

Rides can be on easy, smooth, hard packed dirt or stone dust (soften nicer than pavement!) or on more challenging dirt, grass or gravel (like after maintenance/regrading or after a rainy washout). I will try to describe the route conditions in the weekly posts.

Come join the ride with your bike of choice and see how it goes! Narrower tires? Expect to walk a bit. Wide knobby mountain bike tires? Expect to work a bit harder on the pavement. Anything in-between should be fine! This is not a fast paced ride, all is good. 

I will try to post a ride every week, but weather issues will effect these rides more than all-pavement rides, so I might be more careful with route choice after heavy rain or flooding conditions.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Fryeburg Bike Path, Airport, Dirt Roads and Haleytown

Looks like the weather will be good for a ride this week. For the first ride I have a relatively short dirt section that should not be muddy after these rainy days. 

Start: Fryeburg Bike Path parking lot at the Maine Visitors Center on Route 302, just over the state line in Maine. There is a bathroom in the visitors center.

Meet ready to ride at 10:00 am

Bring: Food and drink

Route:  Out the bike path to the end, then up to the Fryeburg Airport to watch for planes taking off and landing. We then take a series of dirt roads including Porter and Farnsworth, ending up on Haleytown Road. We can return via Haleytown or we can add more miles by riding Haleytown out to the end, do the Sam Brown Hill loop then ride back via Haleytown.

Total Mileage:  16

Miles on Dirt: About 6

Quality of dirt:  a few sandy spots, some stones, but, as of last fall...generally good.

Map:  https://ridewithgps.com/routes/27363952