Utah State Road Biker

Don't you hate it when you're riding your bike down a hill and all you can think is, "Go faster you stupid car."? I didn't actually think that on Tuesday (June 29th), I have before, but not then. I thought I would because I rode SR-190, aka Big Cottonwood Canyon which is a big... freaking... mountain... As the saying goes, what goes up must come down, I went up the mountain and so I HAD to come down the mountain... to the tune of wind screaming past my ears at over 50 mph... but only for a second or two. My average speed down the hill was probably closer to about 35 mph. You still get pretty good screamage at 35 mph. I had a pretty rough weekend... Work was crazy... I was busy attending a wedding reception and church, and I went home teaching. I have stuff going on at home that is UBER stressful that I won't go into now and Monday afternoon... I sliced my finger opening an envelope... that's right... an envelope. Monday night, I went to a movie w...

Today (June 13th) was the first day in almost a week since I have ridden. I have been following my half iron man training program, and last week was very swim intensive. I also took three days off. Anyway, today called for a 75 minute ride, so I decided to tack on SR-152 (aka Van Winkle Expressway) as part of my ride. 152 starts out at SR-71, about 900 E and 4800 S in Murray. It winds its way south east, up a small hill for 3 miles where it terminates at I-215 in Holladay. I, as per tradition, rode this route backwards (okay I don't have a "tradition" but it seems like the last few routes have all been backwards first). The route was kind of scary at first because it is signed at 50 mph and for the first half mile, there is no shoulder, and it interchanges with I-215. I did my best to avoid being plastered, and finally made it to 6100 S where an ENORMOUS shoulder opens up. Being an "expressway", I didn't think SR-152 would get much bike traffic, bu...

A few months ago K Jo was working on our computer when it crashed... and we lost EVERYTHING. Pictures, music, video game save files, you name it, it was gone. About a week prior to the crash, I had moved all of my state road data from my flash drive to my desktop and never got around to moving it back so I lost all of that too. Pictures, maps, elevation profiles and perhaps most devastating... the list. I spent hours on that list and now it was gone, SO I have once again been working on a list of all the state roads in Utah. This time I just decided to go for broke and make a list of all the state highways, including the ones shorter than 5 miles unlike I had previously planned . While working on the new list, I decided that hitting the short routes would not be too difficult, it would just require a lot of planning. So the other day (Friday June 4th) I headed out on a training ride and decided to add SR-151 (aka 10600 S, aka South Jordan Pkwy aka 10400 s). As I said before, t...