Friday, September 14, 2012

Western Massachusetts Hill Ride

This ride is perhaps one of the more difficult rides I have taken someone on (my brother, in this case). We did this in June 2001. At the time I described it as a 3 bar (energy bars) ride. The ride has a hazardous descent from Hawley to Route 2 followed by a river run (slightly uphill) to the east portal of the Hoosac Tunnel. We watched a train enter from the east. The rest of the ride is rolling to flat (except you gain over 900 feet of elevation by the time you make the turn just past Pelham Lake) until the a steep uphill ride and then descent to Bardwell Ferry (check out the bridge - the pictures on the links at the end of the article show how pretty this bridge really is). The ascent from the river isn't hard but it's long at the end of the day. The rest of the ride seemed unrelenting at the time. We we lucky to have a great bbq ready for us at the end of the day. I have done many of these roads on many occasions but I never replayed this route exactly as shown here.

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