Had a good ride. Ended up laying down a bunch of GPX tracks off of Boneyard main, but that was a fallback after the snow blocked my attempt to do the Butler, W Jordan, Kapoor loop.
Google Map updated. All the roads to the NW of Golledge Creek seems pretty new, and lightly travelled. That means a lack of sharp edged potholes, and road that you can make good time on, but which will compress your suspension.
Day started a bit late, got delayed a little more as I stopped at the corner store to get some food. Muttered something about “not fair” when grabbing a couple of muffins and finding that one flavor was still warm from the oven :). Rode out through Sooke, enjoying listening to music in my helmet due to the new Xmas present headset, and wearing my new winter riding gloves. Traffic into town (other way) seemed heavy… folks chasing boxing day sales?
Started up Butler Main… seemed normal enough, but the situation quickly changed around the 6km mark. The road went from bare, to covered in something like 8 cm of old snow, with a few tire tracks in it. This would have been about 12:45 pm, and not very cold. I managed to make ok time following the truck tracks, but the front tire didn’t really want to break out of the ruts and riding between the ruts didn’t seem to work well (too slippery).
Had to turn around before I saw the next mileage marker (7km?). Fell going up a hill. The back tire was slipping and tracking to the right of the front, but I was holding speed and doing fine… until the back stepped even farther out to the right and I couldn’t get the front tire to the left (probably stuck in the rut) to compensate…. down we go. Took a couple minutes to get squared away…the tires were facing up-hill, so had to drag the bike around before I could lift it… A few more minutes of trying before I gave up on getting restarted on the hill and turned around. It turns out you can bend the shift lever dragging the bike around… it took me a couple minutes to figure out why shifting wasn’t working right.
Rode back down to the Boneyard Main fork, texted Davi to tell her that the plans had changed and I wasn’t going to be able to do the loop, and I would instead be riding in the West Sooke area. From there it was basically a case of laying down GPX tracks. I had been the length of Boneyard main before (first offroad run on the KLR)… but had no GPS then. Ended up exploring a fair amount of new road that wasn’t in openstreetmap (OSM)… strange road… it is new, but the timber IMHO doesn’t support road building (sparse and spindly). Anyhow, it made for good riding. Not enough traffic to generate sharp edged potholes, and unused enough that it hasn’t been graded butter smooth… you could make good time standing in 3rd gear and feeling the suspension compressing and lightening under you :)
Will add pix and more detail later.