Grossed Out and Full Of Questions

A couple of local blog posts by David Blaine and Jacque got me thinking about the west end of town this week, so this morning I flipped a two-headed coin to help me decide between yardwork and a ride. I hadn't been on the Fish Lake Trail for a couple of years and wanted to see what it looks like these days, so I started at the current far west end - 13th and Lindeke.

It was the first real chance I've had to take the monkey off pavement and I was being blown away by how well those massive tires were just rolling over everything in their path and the stability of the whole setup, and I was also seriously enjoying riding in daylight. So by the time I came to what looked like this muddy section, I was feelin' my oats and decided to just power through it. It wasn't until I got to the other side that I became aware of the stench. The smell and the texture of the goop were just so out of place that my mind was having a hard time processing it.

I rode on to the Fish Lake Trailhead. The ride was full of wonderful scenic distractions, but I still couldn't stop thinking about the mud bog. Was that horse shit I was smelled? I know enough about horse shit to know that it smelled like horse shit. In fact I could still smell it because it was all over my bike. I was denying it for all I was worth, but the realization that I had ridden through a pond of liquid horse shit was setting in. WTF.

By the time I came back through, I was beginning to accept reality. It was at this point that I began to feel very sorry for one of the riders before me that obviously hadn't made it through.

But to be honest, I didn't have much time for sympathy, because I was overloaded with questions. How and why is this poop pond sitting in the middle of the FLT?

I got off my bike and headed off trail. The liquid poop mess was coming from the uphill side of the trail (seriously good detective work here). There's a house (horse ranch?) directly above the cesspool and there is goop all over the hillside. I don't know enough about the operation of a ranch to know if there is some common method of dealing with manure that involves suspending it in liquid and then flushing it down a hill next to your ranch. It is hard for me to imagine that this a-hole could possibly be oblivious to what he is doing, so is it intentional? Is he anti-FLT and this is his form of protest? Hmmm. Wow. Hmmm.

I decided to take some deep breaths and let it go. (Actually, the deep breaths were involuntary. But I did let it go.) I came off the FLT and since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to figure out exactly how flawed the advice was that I offered Jacque, regarding his route to work. He's been trying to pedal a trailer full of fireman's gear up the Sunset Hill without ending up plastered to the grill of a Yukon. David Blaine and I volunteered basically the same alternate route.

But as I was looking at the map, I realized that I had never ridden all the way straight up Rosamond, which judging from the map, feeds right back into Sunset Hwy at the top. Sweet! I must have missed the Dead End sign.

You can keep going, sans pavement, but probably not if you're pulling a trailer.

I did complete the loop and suspect that this is headquarters for talking down 747's.