Severe weather and trikes

Severe Weather:

Today I thought it might be fun to go into the city. It is about a six to seven hour ride depending upon my energy, mostly along a busy highway. But the highway has good paved shoulders, so it is usually a pleasant enough ride. And my experience around here is that the drivers on this busy road are pretty friendly and give me lots of room. The highway winds through a mountain pass then climbs up fairly high before descending into the city.

The sky was overcast when I left around 5:00AM, but the forecast had been for clearing later in the day, so off I went. The trike's lights happily flashed and bobbed as I wove through the silent forest trails here towards a logging road. A few miles later the road led to a paved single track, and from there after a few more miles to a double track paved road. An hour or so after that, I joined the traffic heading for the highway. By the time I got there, the sky was clearing and I turned off my lights. The trike is covered in reflective tape, with two flourescent flags one at seven feet and one at five feet. I am easy to see Anyway, the ride was pleasant. People waved to me from their cars. The sky was a bit cloudy, and the weather was cool. Lovely views as I climbed through the pass, and a 75+ descent on the other side. I made it into the city with no problems. After a pause for lunch and some sight seeing, I headed back. It was now early afternoon.

I cycled along the highway's well paved shoulder for a few hours and slowly climbed back up the pass. As I climbed, the sky darkened. I heard heavy thunder in the distance. Suddenly the sky was lit by lightening. The wind picked up. Cars started to turn on their lights. I turned on the trike's flashers. The thunder got closer and louder. I continued to pedal slowly in to the gathering wind. The sky was completely full of black towering cumulmus now. As I reached the top of the climb, the wind really picked up. The lightening was everywhere and huge thunderous crashes of thunder all around me.

Then the rain started. It was cold! The rain came in sheets, but I could still see fairly well. I pulled out my rain pants and jacket from the paniers, and put the fitted rain cover over my helmet. The wind started to really howl. Now I was at the summit, and could hardly pedal into the wind. I had to keep going though, as the shoulder was very narrow at the summit and there was no place to seek shelter or get out of the way of traffic. My flashers are very bright so I was not worried about not being seen. Until the hail started.

When the hail came it was big - the size of small golf balls. It hurt as it hit me. It was so thick that it started to cover the highway like snow. Very, very slippery snow. I heard it bouncing off the passing cars, most of which thank goodness had slowed to a crawl. Now I was worried about a truck or SUV running into me, since the road had become very slippery. After about ten minuites the hail became so heavy and thick that whiteout conditions prevailed. I could not see more than a few feet ahead. Some cars pulled over onto the shoulder in which I was riding. This meant that I had to try and pass them by pulling into gaps in traffic - gaps I could hardly see.

Why not just pull over myself? The non-highway side of the shoulder was a shear drop off into the valley below. I knew that cyclists had been struck by cars when they (the cyclists) had stopped on the shoulder in heavy fog. The wind and hail made for conditions similar to fog. The advice of the police had been to keep moving if at all possible to try and find a safe place to pull over. Also, they had said that movement caught a driver's notice much better than a stationary person with a bike. So I kept moving, hardly able to see, hail painfully impacting the body and trike, while horrendous thunder pounded and lightening flashed all around me.

Bottom line - it made more sense to me at the time given the nature of the storm and traffic patterns to keep moving. So I did. Very slowly and carefully to avoid sliding around too much. As cars and trucks passed, they sprayed dirty water all over the trike and its pilot. My riding glasses (never, ever, ride a trike without protective eyeware - cars throw stones up all the time) were covered with dirt and I had to stop every few hundred feet to clean them off. Anyway, things went on like that for a while. Then the storm broke, the wind changed direction, and the hail changed back to rain. I rode on for a couple of hours in that rain, until I got through the pass. At that point the clouds started to lift, the thunder and lightening stopped, and the sun broke through. 

I made it home and soaked in a hot bath. Tomorrow I will clean up the trike. Great ride!