Yesterday's cycling was a bit different from what I normally do of late. I was honored to be invited on Vincent Flanagan's annual “Kyoto Rooftop” birthday ride, on an often-gravel forestry road that follows the undulating ridgeline across 65km of mountains north of Kyoto. (You might remember Vincent from my bike fitting at Pedalforth.)

First we ride about 60km (37mi) northwest of Kyoto to get to the far end of the forestry road. Then snake around on the ridgeline road for about 65km (40mi) east. Then return home over Hanase Pass.

I added a little extra at the end, the easier half of a Kyoto Heart Loop, and ended up for the day riding 163km with 3,880m of climb (101mi with 12,700' of climb):

It was by far the most climb I've done in a day.

Because there are sections of heavy, rough gravel, I didn't want to use my road bike, so I dusted off my original Trek bike for the first real ride since this epic adventure last September.

Until looking at the photo above, I'd never noticed the “25% Slope” sign. The location is near the top of Kyoto’s Nasty 21% city-bike hill climb, and at the start of the descent there's an appropriate “21% slope” sign. This one is a bit premature, and a bit incorrect.

After about 2½ hours of riding, we got to the last store before we would enter the forestry road. There are no services whatsoever along the entire 65km-length of the road, so we'd not be able to buy drinks until exiting it toward the end of the day, nor get food until returning to Kyoto. So we stocked up here.

Just before entering the forestry road, we stopped by a little temple for a photo op...

And then finally we started the day's ride proper.

The road is closed to unofficial motor vehicles, but it's fine for bicycles and hikers.

Coincidentally, this road appeared on my previous post because the road I took that day crossed this one, though quite far from this morning's entrance point: it would be 4½ hours of rough riding before we'd get even that far.

Most folks walked their bikes around the gate, but some rode around...

And so at 10am, we were off on the ride proper.

It starts out fairly steep, but I've given up trying to show steepness in photos... I just can't do it.

At least the pavement at the start is wonderful. Later, both the steepness and the road surface become worse. Much, much worse.

Here the road is rough gravel, and probably by this point has alternated numerous times among pavement, rough gravel, and compact gravel. The areas of rough gravel were quite tough for me when steep, either steeply descending or ascending. I'd ridden on parts of this road two other times, but something about today was much worse than I remember. The rough gravel seemed to be laid over a bed of quicksand that just grabbed the tires.

I've never walked through a pool of oatmeal up to my hips, but that's the mental image that came to me while riding some sections of this road.

Returning for a moment to my inability to capture steepness in a photo...

I just snapped these as I rode by. I suppose I should be able to learn something from this sequence about perspective and a sense of slope.

It's not uncommon to have beautiful vistas like the one above spoiled by power lines, but in these cases it's the presence of the power lines themselves that create the vistas. The only reason the view so steeply down wasn't obscured by vegetation is because it's kept clear for the power lines. You see the same effect here.

There was some discussion about the bridge we could see from that spot, with folks offering different ideas about what area we were looking at. I though it was hilarious when Christoph muttered “That's Sanjo Bridge, you fools” to no one in particular. (Sanjo Bridge is a location in Kyoto City where we often meet up for rides).

In reality, the bridge is the Nagase Bridge (長瀬大橋). Here's the view from the bridge up to where we took the photo, via Google Streetview:

Of the nine folks on the ride, four got punctures, though the two lucky folks above (Ryuta and Neil) got three punctures each.

Not long after I took this photo, the three of us were racing to catch up to the main group, who were likely 15~20 minutes ahead by the time we got moving. After a long set of wonderful downhills, I paused when I came across Vincent fixing a grate in the road, and waited for Neil and Ryuta. Neil arrived momentarily, but Ryuta never showed, even though he had just been right behind us. He must have gotten another flat, so I turned around to head back, and Vincent tossed me a spare innertube of an appropriate size for Ryuta's tire. 70m of vertical climb later, I came across him, and he appreciated Vincent's tube (and the new pump I'd bought after my day of many flats).

He didn't have another flat for the rest of the day, but he was certainly nervous about it for the rest of the day.

There was some correlation between type of bike (and hence type of tire) and the number of punctures. Particularly after my day of many flats, I didn't want to try this kind of gravel with a road bike, which is why I brought my Trek and its relatively new 32mm wide Scwalbe Marathon Plus tires.

But there's some matter of luck (or the lack thereof) as well. One experienced rider with 40mm-wide tires got a flat for no apparent reason.

This was three hours into the forestry road, and the first of the few places where the forestry road crosses a public road. This particular location is close to the photogenic scene that's appeared on my blog a couple of times.

An hour and a half of ups and downs later, we were finally at the place I mentioned before, where Gorm and I had crossed the forestry road in my previous post. This time we had no Gorm, but we did have antlers...

Some of the ugliest sections of road awaited us, with 11~12% gradients both up and down, with loose sandy rubble as the road surface. It's been a long while since I had any worry about falling over while riding clipped in, but on some of these steep uphill gravely sections I grew quite worried about losing traction, seeing my forward motion suddenly stop, and falling over before I could unclip my foot. I felt immature as a cyclist to have this worry, until I found out that two very experienced riders in the group had actually fallen over for exactly that reason. It brought to mind the Japanese proverb “Even Monkeys Fall from Trees”.

In any case, these sections were not fun at all. I'd done them twice before without such a strongly-negative feeling, so maybe it was the condition of the road this day, or of me.

I brought 3½ liters of drink with me (almost a full gallon!) for the forestry-road section of the ride, but it was running low, so when I came across a mini road-side waterfall created by recent rains, I took the opportunity to fill up my bottle....

I also had an empty 2L bottle that I filled up, for the less-prepared folks waiting at the summit of the ride.

The road undulates wildly up and down, but this particular “up” is the highest of the entire 65km length of road. There's a little marker indicating so:

This is another photo from a year ago, one of the rare places you could see clearly down into a valley (without power lines, that is). This village is on the road leading to Sasari Pass, which I'd taken with Gorm the other day.

I finally exited the forestry road at about 4:15pm, more than six hours after entering. A few folks had exited much earlier, and others would still take a while due to flats, but once we were all out and had restocked our drinks at a vending machine, we headed home over Hanase Pass. The non-gravel road surface gave me renewed energy, and I gave the 30-minute climb some effort, but I missed my PR by 23 seconds. Drat.

I really did not like the heavy gravel sections — it's just not my cup of tea — but otherwise it was a great day with great folks.