You can get very spoiled riding bikes on Iowa’s trails – no cars to worry about except at infrequent intersections with usually pokey gravel roads. But yesterday – in part because one of our favorite trails, the (unpronounceable) 20-mile Chichaqua Valley Trail from Bondurant to Baxter, east of Des Moines, is partially closed – we decided to try riding on a few county roads paralleling the trail.
It helped that the roads we were (S52 and F24) were chosen by the Iowa Bike Coalition as good – and included as part of a recommended loop on their new biking map that I recently picked up for $2.50 at a bike shop in Des Moines. On a gorgeous fall Sunday, the two-lane roads were mostly quiet – but every once in awhile a car or truck would come up from behind and scare the be-Jesus out of us. My husband was particularly worried about combines and grain trucks – since it’s harvest time.
The roads were very hilly – so a challenge to ride from that standpoint too – with visibility limited. When I could banish my fear of approaching cars, riding the country roads was fun – you get a really different feel for the countryside than on the trails where you are more insulated and your view more restricted. You’re riding in the middle of the corn field rather than on the edge of it, if that makes sense.
Anyway, by the time we got to the small town of Mingo on county roads we were very ready to return to the safety of a trail – and we gladly hopped on the Chichaqua Trail, riding south to Valeria, where the trail was closed thru to Bondurant, due to damage caused by flooding last year. We had the trail from Valeria to Baxter (via Mingo and Ira) almost to ourselves – about a 10 mile stretch – because, I’m guessing, 1) people think the trail is completely closed and 2) the High Trestle Trail has become so popular that it’s siphoning off riders on the the Chichaqua Trail.
The weather was a balmy 75 degrees or so and the trees and light were in their autumnal glory – we rode through tunnels of trees changing color, our tires crunching on fallen leaves, the sun making shadows that dappled the path, gliding past fields of browning corn and golding soybeans, past the occasional combine harvesting away or tractor in the distance making hay bales. Iowa in its glory.
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