The mountains around Kyoto are such fertile ground for cycling adventures, I consider many of the rides I go on to be “epic adventures”, but the ride a month ago hinted at in “Preview of an Epic Cycling Adventure with Andy and Nigel” stands out.

It was supposed to be a short, vanilla outing on well-known roads, but ended up being a fantastic adventure. Finally, a month later, I'm getting around to posting the longer version of the story.

Andy Clark and I met up with Nigel Randell at a convenience store at the foot of the mountains in northern Kyoto. Joking around about the horrible setting for a portrait (a busy background with cars, fences, signs), I took Andy's picture. A nice smile can compensate for the worst background...

The route (full ride map) took us up the super-hard Momoi East. There are two mountain passes that are collectively referred to as “Momoi” because one normally just follows the road through the first right to the second, but we stopped in the small hamlet between, on a side road, at the bulls-eye here in the map:

Few riders seem to stray from the road marked in yellow, so don't realize that there's a vending machine at the bulls-eye spot. It's quite convenient, and the guys got coffee.

They're silly-crazy guys that egg each other on, so they got silly-crazy for the camera.

Their silliness somehow reminds me of a video by Freddy Wong, an American guy who started putting up videos on YouTube when he was 13 years old, with an ever-increasing quality and complexity of video-effect editing. He's now an adult making what one can only imagine is an extremely lucrative living on YouTube. Anyway, Andy and Nigel's antics made me think of one of Freddy's earlier videos, “Huge Guns”.

(You can see how far he's progressed in the video-effect department by comparing that with his latest video.)

We had intended to return to the well-traveled road and finish our vanilla outing, but instead decided to take the road less traveled, the “unknown” road marked with the green arrow in the map above. I'd discovered that road on a wonderful trip the previous week with Manseki, so I knew that lovely roads awaited us.

The rain that was starting to sprinkle was less lovely.

At one point the road turns to gravel, and it's at that point that most folks who ventured this far would turn around, but it turns out that the gravel section is only 250m long before the road returns to pavement.

We eventually make it to Ogose Pass (尾越峠) at 727m (2,385') and continued down the other side. Nigel thought to take a video of me descending...

Nigel had issues with his camera, so I went back and did it again...

I don't know whether you can see the green color of the road, but the road surface was permeated with mossyness, which would make it extremely slippery if the rain picked up enough to make it through the treecover. It's steep enough that it's slippery even when dry, at least when riding out of the saddle where most of your weight moves to be over the front tire, leaving little weight to help the drive wheel grab traction. I was a bit worried about the return trip.

Toward the bottom of the descent, there are some junk cars, an unfortunately not-rare sight in Japanese mountains...

We continued through the very small (seven houses) hamlet at the foot of the descent, and up the start of the next climb. Eventually the road gets pretty rough and gravely, and in the previous trip I'd gotten only so far as a gate across the road a few kilometers past the hamlet. But this time we could ride through freely, and soon after the road returned to pavement.

And, at about the same time, the rain really picked up.

And then Andy got a flat.

After 1.1km of 7.9% climb on utterly-pristine paved roads, we came to a “T” in the road and this rustic road sign:

We'd never heard of “Haccho-daira”, but knew “Kuta” well, so we went that way.

The pavement had ended at the “T”, and the road became very rough crushed rock... too rough to be called “gravel”...

Especially since Andy had already had a flat, he wasn't in the mood to ride this kind of crazy-rough surface on his road bike, but we egged him on for a bit.

We really didn't want to turn around — that slippery return up to Ogose Pass was on my mind — but we also didn't want to continue if the road was this bad. Because I had the most offroad-ish bike (my new bike hadn't arrived yet), I took it upon myself to go ahead a bit to see whether the road got better, and indeed 200m later it did, changing to normal gravel. So with Andy's grumbles mostly ameliorated, we forged ahead.

This pass doesn't actually have a name that I could find, so I just named it myself, for the mountain that it goes over.

Having arrived at the pass we knew that it must be mostly downhill from here, literally. Little did we know that the best adventure for the day still awaited.

Continued here...