Day trip to Marquette

I'm way overdue on writing this report up, but I wanted to get the pictures shared and also while I was at it just spew what I did.  What I'm talking about actually happened on Oct 30th.  It's been a heck of a year at work and I've not had much time to de-stress myself, so I decided that I'd take a vacation day and head somewhere to ride.  I'd done this one other time this year when I did a trip to the kettles, but I figured on doing somewhere different.  I considered Levis Mound but then did math and for only 15min more I could make it to Marquette.  Sorry Levis, you'll have to wait for another trip.

I decided on a Friday, waited for weather forecast to come in, then made the trip.  I loaded up for an early departure (5am I think) and headed up.  Until it was light out it was a heck of a trip - tired, questioning what the heck I was doing, etc.  Then, the sun came up as I was driving through the UP and I started to get happy.  Leaves were still changing, it was a beatiful day (but cold), and it was going to be great.

For bike, I brought the scalpel.  Loaded it up with a dropper post borrowed from DR, a Thomson.  I am eyeing them up and happened to mention it to him, he was nice enough to let me borrow it.  I loved it but more on that another time.

I chose to ride Marquette south for a few reasons - one is I haven't ridden there in summer, and two was it was the best spot I felt to ride all day, tire myself out, and then head home with a great variety of terrain to mess around with.  I had ridden some of the trails in the winter during the 906 Polar Roll - actually quite a bit of it once I figured that out.

Trails I took were Carp Eh Diem, then Pioneer Loop, then did some Benson climbing to Eh Line and back up to Down Dogger.  After that I took a quick break at the truck then did some of the blue loop.  That was pretty challenging with the rocky terrain and being covered by leaves for most of the trail, but it was absolutely beautiful.  I got a bit goofed up on the loop there but it was fun.  I did the Grom loop too.

All in all, it was about 20mi, 2,300' of climbing.  Great day and a good warmup for Iceman for my legs which have really not ridden more than 1x per week all summer long.  I'm obviously not as fit as I have been in the past but I'm trying when I do ride to get longer rides in to keep endurance there.