Route of the Hiawatha

Today didn't turn out exactly as I expected. Mike and I were going to ride the Hiawatha trail. Here's the blurb, "The Crown Jewel of Rail Trails! A 13-mile historic rail trail through nine train tunnels and across seven skyhigh trestles, for mountain biking and hiking." Great! Sounds like fun. Mike was not as enthusiastic but he humored me and came along. We loaded the bikes up and stopped at lookout pass to buy our passes and the shuttle tickets for the way back up. At the very beginning of the trail is the 1.8 mile Taft tunnel. You have to bring a headlight because it is pitch black through the tunnel and it's 40 degrees year round. I was unsure at first but this turned out to be the best part. It was actually pretty cool! After about 2.5 miles into the ride, I mistakenly took us down the wrong road (the shuttle road) for about a mile which was steep and rocky. When we figured out it was the wrong way, we had to hoof it back up hill to the trail. This really sucked! Then, to make matters worse, on the trek back up, Mike's peddle fell off his bike. The nut holding it on was lost. Keep in mind he didn't really want to go in the first place and now he has to ride the other 12.5 miles down with one peddle. The bungee that we were using to hold a flashlight on the bike was used to hold his foot to the peddle. We didn't take many photos after that because he didn't want to lose his momentum downhill. I rode the gimp bike for about the last 5 miles. It really was a gorgeous ride with all the tunnels and trestles. Here are the photos that I did take. One is pre-peddle malfunction.

And here is the other time we stopped. Post-peddle malfunction. I suspect the smile is fake.