I took a long bicycle ride into the mountains north of Kyoto on Saturday. It was my first long outing since recovering from what I thought was a mild but persistent cold, but turned out to be a respiratory-tract infection. Once I got antibiotics, I felt better almost right away.

Since I was mostly out of commission for three weeks, I knew I was out of shape and wouldn't be particularly fast, but at the same time, I was on my new bike, which seems to let me go faster for the same effort, so in the end I didn't know which competing effect would win.

To start my ride, I joined Andy Clark on a trip up to Hanase Pass, 710m higher than where I live, and the first big climb I ever did, so it has a special place in my heart. It was my first to try it with the new bike, so I hoped I could shatter my old record, but I could feel right away that I just didn't have the energy. Three weeks being sick had just made me too soft.

And it's just as well that I wasn't on track for a killer time, because I stopped to assist a pair of boys — maybe 10 or 11 years old — that I came upon on the deserted mountain road looking at a big map book of Japan, wondering where they were. Wanting to go to Hanase Pass, they were on the correct road, but didn't know how far along they were. I helped them with directions and info on where to get beverages. According to my tracklog, I spent 1:54 with them.

A young, fast Japanese cyclist had passed me not long before I came across the boys... I wonder why he didn't stop to help them. Even if they were not standing looking at a map, I'd at least touch base with kids so young in such a place.

Anyway, Andy and I made our slow way up to the pass and all the way down the other side. Andy didn't have time for a longer ride, so we parted ways and he retraced his steps.

I was dead tired, but from being out of shape and not from the cold, so I wanted to continue along, slowly, to see where the day would take me.

It first took me north to Nomi Pass, where I met a construction worker at the top. He told me to take care with my descent, because there would be some big construction equipment moving up. He wasn't kidding.

Emerging from the mountains to the edge of a small village, you're greeted with a quintessential old farmhouse that just naturally begs to be photographed:

The same house covered in snow was seen in this photo from my first big ride in February, and in the spring when recreating that first ride three months later.

The front of the house looks like a field of weeds...

... so it's hard to believe it's the same house that was fronted with a lovely sea of flowers when I went by two months ago.

Normally the roof is finished and painted, like this one.

On the long and pleasant Route 783 up to the start of Onyu Pass, there's a turnoff that I'd been wanting to check out....

When peeking in, it dives up the mountain in an inviting way:

The road is not marked on Google Maps (and it's on OpenStreetMap.org only because I added it), but looked inviting on Google Earth. But with the aforementioned dead tiredness, I paused for a while and took a nap, using a log by the side of the road as a pillow...

After about half an hour, I took off up the unknown road. It turns out to be about 1.4km (0.9mi) long, rising at an average grade of 10.6%, ending unceremoniously into the face of the mountain:

To be clear, this is not a road that had been sealed off by a rockfall... the road construction just stopped here.

Also, unlike the Bridge to Nowhere that I posted about nine years ago, it doesn't appear that this is an ongoing project that I just happen to have caught in this useless state.

The road does not appear to have any reason to exist... there's no dam or cell tower it's allowing access to, and it's not supporting forestry or farming or anything else I could see. It's just a beautiful road painstakingly cut into a very steep mountain, never to be used. I can only imagine what the construction workers thought as they painted the highly-reflective white lines right up to the blunt rockface.

The best I can guess is that the road was intended to be continued over the mountain to join up with where Route 783 has looped back down, cutting off a 14km-segment of Route 783 for those just wanting to move east. If that's the case, the project seems to have been abandoned.

Anyway, it makes for a nice 150m climb. The road surface is nice for all but a short section where it's become warped and buckled, though it's littered with rocks here and there. On the climb I'd concentrated on just not giving up, but for the ride down I pulled out the camera.

I ended up making a segment for the climb on Strava. Unsurprisingly, I'm the only one who's done this section of road before....

Back on the country lane heading north, this is a typical scene when coming across the occasional house:

I had the pleasure to chat with Neil Holt, whom I came across as he rode south...

Coincidentally, I was with Neil the last time I'd been on this road. It was nice to have a little chat. He told me about a back road that I would end up taking later on my ride.

After our chat, I continued north, plodding up to the 839m elevation of Onyu Pass, where someone who had arrived by car kindly took my photo for me...

The view to the south, where I'd come from, leads this post.

The two other times I'd made the climb up here, I paused often while descending to take photos, but this time I just went directly down at a pretty fast clip. It was fun.

I thought that there was no commerce for many miles, so I was surprised to find a cafe in the middle of nowhere. It turns out that they're open only on weekends and holidays, from 9am to 3pm...

They didn't have any food, just coffee, but the proprietor took pity on my hunger and gave me a bunch of chocolate and cookies...

Feeling a bit refreshed, and filling my water bottles at an outside fountain near the cafe, I headed east toward Route 367, about 20 kilometers away. It was my first time to head that way, previously always returning due south the way I'd come. I didn't know what to expect, but hoped it'd be faster and less hilly than the route I knew. I was really tired and daylight was limited.

I eventually came to a turnoff that Neil had told me about. Two days prior he'd seen that a friend had “discovered” an old back road that Neil had not known about. It sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try.

Both roads have feeble “road closed” signs. The one to the right was not on my map, so I took the one to the left. Looking later on Google Earth, the one to the right appears to be similar to the road-to-nowhere one I rode earlier in the day. I'll have to check it out next time I'm in the area.

The road ended up being a pretty standard deep-country mountain road, mostly clear but with sections of moss and muck that would make it really unappealing for bicycles when wet.

The western approach that I took ended up being 3.4km with an average grade of 7%. Not too challenging. I made a segment for it on Strava, and I'm the only one to have ridden it so far. The friend who had ridden two days prior had come from the other direction, and so far he's the only one to have ridden that segment. I guess the road is not very popular compared to its alternative. I've never taken the alternative so I can't compare, but on a dry day this traffic-less road seems nice.

A trail-running path cuts across the pass, reminding me that I'm a wimp to use wheels...

For my part, hours away from home with not that much daylight left, I headed down.

I went much faster than I should have, often hitting rocks that I didn't see among the leaves. I was sort of surprised that I didn't get a puncture, until I got a puncture.

It was my first time to change a tire when it wasn't pouring rain with the wheel covered in grime. It was lovely, and when I was done my hands were still clean.

Now on the substantially-larger Route 367, I had a straight-forward ride home. I was tired and drained and just wanted to be home, but I stopped at the first cafe I came to just to get some calories. I'd brought plenty, but had long since eaten it all.

I was really in a rush, so consulted with them on what would be the fastest to prepare, and ordered a “mixed sandwich”. But then I noticed cake behind the counter, and ordered that as well, knowing it'd be fast. Here's how it arrived:

It came garnished with a grape, which I popped into my mouth the moment I put the camera down. It was the most delicious food ever created by man or nature. Two bites later, the cake was gone.

After this I headed straight home on Route 367. As I discussed in a recent post, Route 367 has a bunch of tunnels that are safer to avoid, but at this point I valued speed pretty highly... I just wanted to be home. I have a very bright tail light, so I don't actually feel the tunnels are all that dangerous, so I took them all.

The closed and broken road that one tunnel bypasses, that I wrote about the other day, would have been much easier today because the water level was down. I had a nice view of it from the bridge between tunnels.

Much of the long trip home is uphill, but it's worth it for the fast downhill sections, which I love. On one section (discussed here) my on-bike speed indicator said that I reached 78kph (48mph), so that was a new record for me. I've got to thank Andy Clark for that... on the descent together from Hanase that morning, he offered comments on some of my un-aerodynamic ways he'd noticed. Using his advice, I was able to break 70kph on four different sections of road on the way home.

So, that was that. By the time I got home, I was the most tired I'd been after a bike ride since returning home after my first big ride in February.

I uploaded my data to Strava, and immediately saw which of the competing factors (out-of-shape slowness vs. new bike speed) was most impactful. All the yellow marks at the left edge told me that the bike is really fast, even if I'm slow:

The yellow icons shaped like crowns mean that I'm the fastest male to have done the segment, but in these cases it's because I'm the only male to have done the segment, so they don't mean anything. But the other icons, with “PR” (Personal Record) in them, mean that I did it faster this time than any time before. The two near the top that have no mark are when I had stopped along the way. I was tired the whole time, and felt very slow, so these results just show how correct everyone was who said a new bike would be fast.

On my personal benchmark hill climb, the climb to Hanase Pass, despite having stopped to help the kids for a couple of minutes, I still beat my personal best by more than two minutes. I wouldn't have broken 30 minutes even if I hadn't stopped, but I think that'll be my personal goal for the near term. According to Strava, folks have done it in 20 minutes, which is just unfathomable to me.

So that was my Saturday. Now it's Tuesday and I'm mostly recovered, I hope. Gotta' get back into form....

This post picks up from “Last Month’s Particularly Epic Cycling Adventure, Part 1”, about a ride that I took with Nigel Randell and Andy Clark a month ago. Part 1 ended with us having reached Minetoko Pass (elevation 888m / 2,900') on a long gravel road.

The descent down the other side was often very rough, and the rain continued, but it was worth it because the views and general scenery were often gorgeous.

One thing that set this descent apart is that the forest it traversed seemed to be mostly original virgin wood, and not farmed ceder seen almost everywhere else. The ample deciduous trees should make this path spectacular next month.

There was a sharp edge across the road where the pavement restarted, and I hit it too quickly and got a pinch flat, only the second flat I've gotten since starting to ride earlier this year. Like the first time, it was raining as I changed the tire.

Eventually the road returned to civilization, only to be blocked by a padlocked gate.

I don't understand how a public road can be suddenly gated like this... there was nothing to stop us getting here, so why not let us continue?? We certainly weren't going to spend the hours required to retrace our steps, so we went over the gate.

This let us out just east of Nomi Pass. It's an area I knew well, having done it on my first big ride last February, and three other times since.

When doing a climb, even if it's cold and rainy, the effort you put into it generates a lot of heat. But then on the descent, you can get very cold quickly, and with this long descent and my flat tire, by now we were pretty cold and miserable. Unfortunately, the area is devoid of stores or other commerce for many miles, except, fortunately, one restaurant in the middle of nowhere, the Iroha Cafe (いろはカフェ). Were very lucky to find the lady that runs the cafe outside accepting a delivery when we rolled past. She wasn't open yet, but kindly opened up for us.

She has big baskets filled with various cookies and crackers and treats, all free for the taking. When faced with such bounty, in the condition we normally arrive (cold and miserable), we always clean them out. I try to pay a bit extra to make me feel better about having been such a pig.

She was open for business by the time we left, and parked outside on the road was the logging truck of a customer:

With the clock ticking down and the rain still coming down, we decided to take the most expeditious route home, so headed east to Route 367.

Route 367 has the benefit of being a fairly fast and direct route back to Kyoto, but it's got a lot of traffic and something like six or seven tunnels, which can be quite dangerous especially since they're on uphill segments, so you're going much slower than traffic. (Taking the road from Kyoto makes it much less dangerous, because you're going downhill and so can travel with traffic.)

Most of the tunnels can be bypassed by taking the old, steep, twisty sections of road they replace, but the bypass around three tunnels in succession was closed off. We decided to give it a try anyway... roads that are closed to cars are often easily passable by bicycle (like this and this).

I mean, really, just how bad can it be?

I was thinking to just forge ahead into the river, when Nigel beat me to it...

Nigel took a short video of me slogging through the water, until I stopped at a big sandbar because I was worried about falling off while clipped in. I didn't want to fall, but particularly didn't want to fall on video. 🙂

With all our fun adventures, time was really running short, so we decide to skip the next bypass and go through the tunnel. This bypass (seen here) involves a 100m climb that we didn't have the time for.

I don't feel that tunnels are particularly dangerous if you have good lights, but I seem to be in the minority. In any case, at least on Route 367, traffic seems to come in bunches, so we waited until a bunch passed then dove into the tunnel.

On the preview post last month I included this photo:

... but that's been post-processed to bring up the light level. This photo is closer to reality:

It depends on the tunnel; some are very well lit. (On a separate ride yesterday, I ended up taking all the tunnels on this route.)

The tunnel above ends at the top of a long descent, with both twisty parts and fast straightaways...

That was the last photo I took... the rest was just vanilla “get home” riding.

All in all the ride was way more fun than its 99.8km would suggest. Fun folks, new routes, forging a river... what more could one ask for? Epic day.

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...

I had the pleasure to have lunch today with Rick and Lily Hancock, visiting from Seattle. Rick has been reading my blog for years, and often comments, so we finally met “IRL” (In Real Life).

We spent all our time talking over ramen at Gogyo (五行) so didn't have much time for an outing afterwards, but walked over to the Rokkaku-do Temple for a few pictures.

As I described on this post six years ago, it's common at temples and shrines to pay a small fee for a random “fortune paper”. If you get a good one, you take it home, but if your fortune is bad, you leave it tied it to strings or sticks near where you got it. An example from earlier in the year can be seen here.

At the place today, they were tied to an actual willow tree.

The temple dates back at least 800 years, presumably predating the Starbucks Coffee immediately adjacent to it.

I feel a bit sorry for these in-city temples that have become hemmed in by modern progress, though I suppose whether an immediately-available Starbucks is a curse or a blessing likely depends on just how much you like slightly-overpriced consistently-made good-enough coffee.

(Rick and Lily are from Seattle, but have never been to a Starbucks, a pattern that I don't think they broke today.)

It's Rick's comment in April that really got me to dig into why Strava elevation-gain value for a bicycle ride is unreliable, eventually leading to a massive amount of work that ended up in “The Voodoo of Elevation Gain and Strava (and How I Get Around It)”. But as it turns out, the desire for more accurate results caused me to eventually abandon the initial project favor of an even larger one that combines my ride data with road and elevation data from the Japanese government. I've finally built up a large enough corpus of data on area roads that I can now get very precise elevation-gain data for my rides. It's been a huge amount of work, and it's all Rick's fault.🙂

Rick has promised^* to come back in the spring for an extended cycling vacation, so he'll finally be able to ride the Kyoto mountains he's said he enjoys seeing so much in my blog, and enjoy the fruits of the huge software project that his comment was my impetuous to build.

---

^* He didn't actually promise.

Just an FYI announcement to Lightroom folks, as of version 20151010.134, my Metadata Wrangler plugin now allows you to add/overwrite certain metadata fields like Title and Caption. Previously, it could merely remove metadata that was already there.

My publish/export plugins generally give a lot of control in how those fields are populated during export, but most other plugins do not, nor do Lightroom's built-in export methods, so those users may appreciate being able to craft their metadata. Through the template tokens that my plugins support, you have access to the breadth of data about the image from your Lightroom catalog, and can use it as you see fit to construct your new metadata fields.

Its length is fairly comical, but here's what the plugin's dialog section now looks like. The new functionality is at the bottom.