Fracking and Napping the Ides of March

03/15/12 #238 33m 2h38m

Rode the Montour Trail, starting at Enlow and riding southwest. I haven't been out this way in a while, and the nascent Marcellus Shale footprint has really changed the local landscape.

There's the fracking fluid remediation facility in Boggs, which sits on top of a series of abandoned mines. There's the trail reconstruction to accommodate a fracking-fluid railway between MP19 and MP21, a major bit of earth-sculpting. At the road crossings there's a lot of shale vehicles and equipment, and at MP16 there's this sight of blue skies, birdhouses, and resource retrieval:


They really do make an effort to be sub-overt.

After Route50 the trail resumed its normal path, and somewhere around MP23-ish I found a favorite grassy spot under a tree and indulged in a bike nap. (See related flickr group)

I had a very nice nap of about a half-hour, just enough time for some major whack dreaming and some serious snoring, then I woke up feeling quite sprightly and enjoyed the ride back to the start all the more. I think napping along the trail is something that senior citizens can get away with, and I'm going to start embracing my Inner Geezer on days like this.

Today's snack experiment was an Odwalla White Chocolate, Macadamia Nut Bar, totally excellent. There's not any water available along this segment of the trail, and the soda machine at the Rt.50 skin cancer dispensary tanning salon was sold out, so the bottles were dry by the time I was done.