I had an enjoyable bike ride of exploration around the nooks and crannies of Ohara the other day, so I thought I'd share some photos. Here's the ride at Strava:

The impetus for this ride was to check out some of the minor roads I'd seen on 路面と勾 配 (literally “road surface and slope”), a blog full of reports on exceedingly-minor mountain roads, each replete with detailed photos and commentary. He's got well over 1,000 such reports so far.

I spend a fair amount of my time updating OpenStreetMaps based on his articles. These are the maps used by Strava, Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps), maps.me, and many others, so where I've done this these maps are more accurate than Google Maps.

Once I got out of the city, I tried to take any little street that looked like it might go somewhere. Usually they didn't.

Before heading out, I scoured the satellite view in Google Earth for things that looked interesting, such as this recently-built dam with a road that wasn't on any map:

The approach road, though, was paved only so far, and then I ran into gravel:

I knew from the satellite view that it would become paved again, but I didn't have all that much time, so I decided to defer. Plus, I knew there were two other potential approaches to the dam road, so I went to try them...

Continuing on, I came to another location I'd spotted via Google Earth, a place I'd ridden by dozens of times without ever noticing....

Let's head on up to the first corner...

Until this point the average grade is just over 25%, but it flattens out a bit around one more corner, eventually reaching the temple...

Because it flattened out at the end, the full climb from the road averages only 22.1% over its short-but-sweet distance of 150m. It's a little longer and a little steeper than the “Nasty” hill in Kyoto.

Sadly, Strava no longer allows one to create that-short a segment. The shortness of the segment, combined with the impreciseness of GPS tracking that non-geek athletes don't really understand, probably results in too much burden on their customer-service department, so they just disallow them now. One Stava user got around the problem by extending the distance to include 170m of the run-up to the climb in the segment, creating the “for Sairinji Climb” segment. Better than nothing. I'm the third Strava user to have made the climb.

I continued on my way to putz around the minor streets. One paved street ended at a little cemetery.

The road continued into the woods, but unpaved...

The maps I consulted indicated that in one area I should find some tennis courts, and indeed I did...

... but the road that they indicated should have exited from the area, not so much:

I finally made my way to the main road I wanted to check out, the driveway to a temple. I'd often stopped by the pretty area where the driveway meets the road, but it seems I've posted about it only once, here.

For some reason I thought the driveway was off limits to all but pedestrians, but after seeing the report on the minor-road blog, I knew it was okay. There's a parking lot up there.

Let me say up front that when it's dry, as it was when I was there, the road is perfectly fine to ride up and down.

But the moss on the edges would make me very wary to take this road were it wet. Still, this road is nowhere near as bad as the road to the Ushio Kannon Temple, which is scary-slippery in the best of times.

In his article on this road, the author of the minor-road blog noticed that this tobidashi-kun has a “K” on it, and wondered what it meant...

So I asked a local, and it turns out that I was talking to the grandmother of a “Ken”, a young child that lived there. His father had made the tobidashi-kun, so added a “K” for his son's name. The lady went on to explain that people steal these things (“geez, how rotten do you have to be?”, I thought), so the father thought to personalize it in the hopes that no one would take it.

All in all it was a pleasant ride. I returned home to find that I'd whittled another second off my best time on this sprint segment, having taken advantage of a partial tailwind. That puts me tied for seventh out of 1,327 people. Now if I can just shave a few more seconds off....