There is no situation that can't be made worse by a bad decision.

This last Saturday I went out for my weekly "Long" bike ride. I've been upping my game on the endurance end for a while now, hopefully preparing for riding a loaded gravel bike (my new Salsa Cutthroat) on the Tour de Los Padres ride in late March next year. It's around 280 miles with over 25,000' of climbing. This is almost all on dirt, with no stores or such to replenish food if I mess up and overestimate how hard it will be and how far I can average every day. I HOPE to do it in 5 days. I've been talking about this ride for well over a decade now (WOW!) I figure it's time to put-up or shut-up, and just do it. So being as I am totally unable how to figure out how to put in simple blank lines (since the Blogger re-do a while ago), I have inserted pictures to break up what otherwise would be an enormous paragraph. So, the following picture is Big Pine Rd on the way to Big Pine Mt.

So, I clicked-in (to the pedals) just a bit after 8am into a clear and pretty chilly morning (it was 42 at my car, and about a mile into the still-shaded-canyon my Garmin showed 32.5 deg). Daytime highs were forecast for mid-60's to around 70, which is PERFECT! I've ridden this part of the Sierra Madre Ridge many tims over the years, it's one of my favorite pieces of the TdLP: Santa Barbara Cyn to Sierra Madre Ridge/Big Pine Rd, then left on Big Pine Rd heading towards Big Pine Mountain. A good portion of this ride borders 1 and sometimes 2 wilderness areas (not long after I make the SMR and turn onto Big Pine Rd, the Dick Smith Wilderness is on my left, and about 5 miles past that the San Rafael Wilderness now borders the dirt road on the right...wilderness on both sides but the road is neither (can't take Mt bikes into Wilderness areas, nor motor vehicles of any type). It's a really beautiful area, SO very picturesque. The following picture is looking out into the Dick Smith wilderness on the way to Big Pine.

Anyway, I was nearing the top of Big Pine Mt (with just a bit over 4000' of climbing already in the bank and just about 19 miles from my car) when disaster struck. The rear derailleur was torn off the bike by a 5 cent piece of plastic when I shifted from 2nd gear to 1st. It happened in the blink of an eye (and this is my 'new' bike, which is just a few months old). But as the title of this post says, there is no situation can't be made worse by a bad decision. I'm 19 miles from my car, the time is around noon, I haven't seen another soul, I'm riding alone, and now I have a broken bike. Not exactly a great situation, but at least I'm not hurt or anything. In the following picture I'm getting close to Chokecherry Spring, evidenced by the trail becoming canopied for a few miles in this area.

Note: the cause of the derailleur rip-off I determined was the black plastic strip on the front derailleur that pushes the chain onto the big ring. Somehow it caught on the chain during the gear-shift, and amazingly it lodged into a chain link which then yanked it the rest of the way out of the front-derailleur on the way by, making it down and around the front small ring just fine, but it DID NOT make it thru the lower rear derailleur pulley, which then tried to follow the chain up and around the 1st gear cog, ripping it right off the bike. So...the 1st bad decision (there were a few it turns out) was to use my chain-break too and make a Single Speed drivetrain. I broke the chain, took off the ruined derailleur, then broke-out more chain so it now wrapped around the front small ring and 2nd gear on the back. There was a small amount of chain-sag on the bottom (where the chain goes front to rear, all the tension is on top which turns the wheel). I truly thought I was in like Flynn and could now pedal up the climbs on my way back, and coast on the downhills...yep...I'm da MAN! And in this picture (below) I'm at Chokecherry Spring. It flows out of the side of the hill, and someone has piped some of it thru a white PVC pipe into a trough that is always chock-full of fresh water.

It SEEMED like such a good idea at the time. But No. MAYBE on a hard mounted bike-trainer sitting side your house that would work, but it turns out not to be the case out in the real world. Without a chain-tensioner keeping tension on that sag on the bottom, there's NO WAY the chain will stay on the cog I put it on (2nd gear) even tho you'd think it would. I coasted down the hill I was climbing when my nice ride was ruined, and then started pedaling up the 1st climb of my return trip. Not too far up the chain suddenly dropped down to lower gears (3rd/4th and beyond). Much like the initial disaster, it happens FAST. But that wasn't really a problem, I'd simply stop and put it back to 2nd and start climbing again. This happened many times in maybe the first mile or so of climbing (so now I'm around 16 miles from my car). All good things must come to an end, and so karma kicks me in the head AGAIN as the chain (the sagging bottom swinging around as I'm climbing the bumpy rocky dirt road) catches a tooth and it jumps to 1st gear real quick and in a hurry (1st is the largest cog, with each successive cog being smaller in size down to the 11 tooth cog). This is BAD BAD BAD (worse than the derailleur being ripped off). You see, it didn't actually 'jump' up to 1st, it GRINDS up onto 1st, giving me now a SUPER TIGHT CHAIN all of a sudden. And there is no way I can un-do that. With the enormous 15mm thru- axles this bike is equipped with, there's flipping the skewer of old and having the wheel plop out of the dropouts which would let me get the chain off of 1st. The thru-axles mean there are no dropouts. Thru axles are like a giant bolt going thru the hub. And I can't unscrew the thru-axle without damaging the axle/frame...it's so tight I can't even budge it. NOW I'm really in a bind. In the following picture I've rounded a corner and there is a spin-off trail, you can see it winding thru the brush towards that little ridge headed towards that distant peak on the upper right of the pic. That's all wilderness.

What to do, what to do. So...I THOUGHT I could still make it as the pedals still turned but very hard (with terrible noise). I figured that with minimal pedaling (only on the climbs) I would still be fine, and sooner or later the chain would give it up and just break, and I'd be right where I was at mile 19, only closer to my car. Well, that didn't happen. What DID happen is that 3 of the 4 aluminum bolts holding the small-ring to the big-ring suddenly ripped out of their holes, so now the small ring (with the now not tight chain still going around it) is held on very loosley with 1 of 4 bolts (and that one is loose, likely damaged too). So NOW I have no choice...I'm walking the climbs like I should have been from the very start, only instead of just a broken rear derailleur I've now got a ruined ring set too. The following pic is a panarama of the same shot above, just includes my road continuing towards Big Pine Mt.

So by now maybe (or maybe not) you are wondering about my 2nd bad decision. At this point I was pretty sure I was going to be out here a while..I can only hike at about 3 mph, and I'm still about 16 miles from the car. So I went ahead and pushed a button on my SPOT (Satellite POsition Tracker) unit, which then sends a pre-made email and text message to Jeannie and Greg (my big brother) that "something happened but I'm ok, and I'm going to be late, don't call anybody". At least I THOUGHT that was the message it was sending. Not on this day. You see, I pushed the wrong button and sent a slightly different message (one that I don't even remember making...this was all done on my SPOT web-page maybe around 10 years ago), that "something happened but I'm ok, but could use some help". And on top of that slightly different message, due to the nature of the particular button I pushed the SPOT unit does NOT go back into "Track" mode like I expected it to do (which is where it sends my position anywhere on the planet every 10 minutes which then updates on my public map page, which Jeannie and Greg could see and know that I'm still moving back towards my car). That would have worked just fine, even with the slightly different message. But NO...I was still getting kicked in the head by Karma (or maybe I'm kicking myself in the head?)...due to that button the SPOT continues to send that same message every 10 minutes, with NO location updates. So now they have no way to see that I'm actually moving towards my car. So as you can imagine, they are both a bit (or a lot) freaked out (SO VERY SORRY Greg and Jeannie!) At some point Jeannie finally calls the Sheriffs dept, they take all her info on me (who, where, what my car is, where it's parked, the lat/long of where my SPOT message shows) and they were about to send someone to look for me. Thankfully I had made WAY better time walking/coasting and I finally get to my car just about the time I was plannong on had nothing gone wrong. After every ride, when I get back to the car I push a different button and send the "I'm ok" message on my SPOT. In the following picture I'm headed up towards Big Pine (that is the mountain directly ahead, the trail/dirt road skirts the left side winding up the mountain). That's a nice little slide onto the road from our storm 2 weeks ago, 1st storm of the season.

So they both get the "I'm OK" message not long after she had called the Sherrif, so she calls them back and says it appears I'm back to my car (the message location shows that position too, so for the 1st time since I turned around she knows where I'm at). I think it's safe to say that Jeannie was pretty mad (to put it very very lightly). And to continue the drama, I'm way out of cell phone range, and after I load up my bike and start driving it's at least 15-20 minutes before I have any service and call home. She was NOT PLEASED. Yeah...it was a pretty hard ending to what started out as a great day. AND, I have a ripped off rear derailleur, AND likely need a new ring set up front (due to my 1st bad decision). The 2nd bad decision was sending a message that I don't even remember making, which did NOT say what I wanted it to say, and then to continue sending that message with no position updates. In this picture IK have stopped to try to repair my ripped off derailleur. Hindsight being 20-20, I sure wish I hadn't done that, and just started walking and coasting. Wasted time AND money is what it turned out to be.

Oddly enough, the derailleur-hanger didn't break when the unit was torn off the bike...so there is that. A teensy little silver lining. Microscopic even. Oh, and I'm ok...that's good too...or mabye not? MAYBE....Maybe if I had crashed, and lets-say had a broken femur (or something similar), and had actually needed a rescue, Jeannie wouldn't have been so mad (and Greg too, but he's 150 miles away so I'm not living in/with his glare and upsetness). You know it's a bad day when a broken femur would have been the better outcome. OK...just kidding there. Or not...(she was SOOOO MAD!) And my final picture is my broken bike parked at the sign to the 'other' wilderness on the other side of the road. Pretty cool...30' or so behind me is the Dick Smith Wilderness, and behind my bike is the San Rafael Wilderness. LOVE IT! Anyway, that's my story from last Saturday. I'm still sucking up and doing my best to be the loving husband who screwed up...seems to be working. But I also realize that there will likely be no statue of limitations on this one...it might very well come back to haunt me over and over again in the coming years. Wish me luck!