Friday, February 15, 2008

A Channel through the Ice

Temperatures from mid 20s to mid 30s, sunny.

Before I left for work today, I reconned the King Canute Path and found some issues. There was about 20 feet of thin ice on the sidewalk leading to South Ireland Street, a bit of ice on the corners and what would be the major obstacle, a good six foot wide span of solid ice between the end of the sidewalk and the main road/exit out of the neighborhood.

The thin ice I dealt with by spreading sand on it since I would not have to make turns to cross it. The stuff on the corners came up easily enough with my brand new ice chopper tool.


The six foot span of solid ice took a bit more work. I lucked out though and it came apart easily enough without too much undue effort on my part. I shoveled the snow fragments aside, spread a little sand at the mouth of the channel and voila, had me a channel through the ice to the dry main roads:


As you can see, so long as one can pause before hitting the channel so as to check for cross traffic, there's no problem with then slowly darting out through the channel and on to the dry pavement beyond.

The rest of the trip in to work was no big deal, just your typical dumbass cagers who weave in and out of traffic seeking to get ahead by that additional car length.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Redlegs, I relate totally. I have made it a practice to ride each of my bikes at least once every calendar month as long as I have owned them. January of 2007, however, almost proved my undoing.

You may recall we had snow week after week back then, and the road never got clear. Finally, on January 28 things were clear enough that, with a bit of work chipping ice and spreading sand on my neighbors sidewalks I was able to ride down the sidewalk to the cross street, walk my bike across the last 20 feet of ice, and get out and ride.

I actually do a blog, too, and wrote about this more fully--you might want to go check it out. Anyway, I'm glad to find you. I did so via Big Cab Daddy's blog. I'm trying to find out who else in the area is blogging about bikes and it's actually harder than you might think.