Full Gear Training Rides/Equipment Validations

 I can safely say, now that the trip is behind me, that I owe my a$$ to the full gear training rides and equipment validations I force fed myself prior to launch.  My strategy was to finalize the gear package and test it out on terrain that was 30-40% more rugged than the worst day on the GDMBR.  I did several full and partial gear training rides and either fixed or adjusted something significant based on each of them.  In the interest of brevity, I’ll just focus on the most important one as an example.

A full gear validation near Nederland, Colorado.  Spring 2007

“The Breck Ride” July 4^th weekend, 2007.  I planned this two-day ride around supporting a friend who was racing the Firecracker 50 endurance mountain bike race in Breckenridge on the 4^th of July.  I was about three weeks out from launching for the GDMBR, and I wanted this to be the last full gear validation before tapering in for the big ride.  I chose the rugged, high altitude singletrack portion of the Colorado Trail between Kenosha Pass and Breckenridge as the ride of choice.   

            The ride started out okay, I started to notice the significance of the all the gear and how it affected the handling of the bike.  There are a couple of single-log balance bar bridges across small creeks on the lower section of the ride.  I had ridden across these logs without issue several times in the past but never with a loaded bike.  I fell completely off one of them, face first in the creek.  How embarrassing.  Luckily nothing was damaged but my pride and I pushed on.  I started noticing problems with rear rack chainstay mounts on the climb up Georgia Pass and tried to shim them out.  As I topped Georgia Pass and started the descent into Breckenridge, I was looking for a good place to camp; as I had started the ride around noon with the intention of doing an overnight to validate camping gear as well.  The downhill was fun and fast, but just as it was about to get dark I heard a nasty crash and a pop behind me at about the same point I saw parts of, what I realized later, was my rear derailleur flying past my head.  Not good.  Especially at over 11000 feet and with still about 20 miles of rugged wilderness trail to go to get to my buddy, who was staying in Breckenridge.

Turns out the rear rack chainstay mounts had finally had enough and failed.  This started the domino affect of the rear OMM rack, with all my gear lashed to it, rotating 90 degrees to the rear and shearing off the rear derailleur at the hangar.  The rear derailleur, being a glorified spring assembly, sprung into the rear spokes, breaking two of them and tangling another.  The force of the shear on the rear spokes rocketed one of them through the outer rim mount, through the tubeless rim strip and, you guessed it; out of the tire.  Yeah, nice. 

After surveying the damage, I made camp and decided to call it a day.  I knew if I could get the tire to hold air and convert the driveline into a single speed I could get out.  It took me about three hours the next morning to make all this happen and another six hours to limp into Breck with all my back rack gear in my backpack and a rear tire that didn’t want to hold air, but I made it.  It sucked and getting it all fixed was expensive, around $600.  But I made several changes based on the direction the Breckenridge ride took that contributed to success on the main Divide trip:

-  I did some more research and decided to drop the tubeless tires and go with the Schwalbe Marathon XRs.  One of the things I had noticed on this and previous rides with the tubeless tires, I was running Hutchison Python 2.3s, was that the sidewalls were “rolling” in the rock gardens and spitting out all the Stans in the process. I was on the fence before the Breck ride disaster, but it brought me to a decision point with the Schwalbe’s, which turned out to be one of the top gear decisions I made.  

-  I reevaluated the rear rack chainstay mount setup, made it better than it was, and packed in some better quick fix solutions.  This chain of events kept the rack together until Whitefish, where I ended up redoing the setup again.

- I decided to carry two extra derailleur hangers rather than one, with a third in my bounce box.

- I identified the weakness in the rear skewer and picked up a new one.

- I redid my tire/tube repair kit and decided to carry a burlier pump. 

- Switching from tubeless to tubed tires meant I didn’t have to carry CO2 to seat the tubeless bead or carry any extra Stans.

I wasn’t able to do any real long-term equipment validations, or else I would have identified the issues with the solar panel and some other small problems that came about ten days or so into the trip.  But all in all, I am glad I took the time to do the validations I did…it saved me time down the road.

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