October is nearly over.  In the Pacific Northwest, this signals the end of the rainy season and the start of the monsoon season.  Fall comes slowly here: leaves begin to turn, then fall into a soggy mass.  Colors are muted by the pervasive gloom as the moist air from the Pacific condenses over the cooling mountains and valleys of the upper left-hand corner of the map.  Ski enthusiasts are checking their gear and waxing their skis.  The bicycle department at REI has been displaced to the back of the store by shiny ski boots and bulky cold-weather clothing.

Yet, here at Chaos Central, as we prepare to head southeast to warmer bicycle touring climes, we see an unabated stream of bicycle tourists, chasing the last vestiges of Indian Summer south toward California.  The last Adventure Cycling tour passed through in late September.  The self-supported stragglers now, at the end of Daylight Savings Time, face headwinds, rain, and quickly shortening days.  As members of Warmshowers, a bicycle tourist lodging exchange, we try not to turn folks away, but we fret over their arrival and worry about their welfare after they leave.

The combination of wind, rain, and temperatures Celsius ranging from a bone-numbing 4 degrees to a high of 10 degrees (50 F) sap energy and drop daily progress to little more than half of normal.  Hypothermia and the onset of darkness far short of the goal are very real dangers for the unwary bicycle tourist.  What promises to be an adventure of a lifetime becomes a matter of survival.  The siren song of the open road impairs judgement.

The Unix Curmudgeon has been a bicycle commuter, off and on, since 1976, riding to work in rain, snow, ice, cold, and darkness, despite being an otherwise fairly cautious person.  The bicycle as transport becomes an obsession, a validation of principle by example.  In recent years, practical considerations–like the goal of “getting very, very old, very, very slowly”–have tempered the issue, helped along by the attitude of the tandem stoker (aka The Nice Person).  The Nice Person’s attitude is this: if we are on tour, we accept the weather, but we plan for the likelihood of good weather.  When we are training, if it is raining, we go to the gym.  Indeed, during 12 years of living in Montana, we chose to live where it was not only convenient to bike to work, but also possible to walk to work on icy days when riding was impractical.

As readers of previous articles know, we recently invested in a Bike Friday tandem.  Other than a systems upgrade to avoid getting caught on the road without ready availability of parts for our classic 1980s Santana, the Traveler Q can be packed into its trailer and checked as baggage or shipped on almost any public transit facility, giving us options to tour anywhere without having to ride there first or having to plan closed-circuit routes.  It also gives us the option of bypassing inclement weather without abandoning our schedules, something we did in 1988 when we had our son drive sag for us on a Rocky Mountain tour that devolved into days of cold and blustery rain: we simply loaded up the bike and moved on up our route until the weather cleared.

We’ve also aborted or modified planned rides in late fall and early spring along the Trail of the Coeur d’ Alenes when there was very real danger of hypothermia on an isolated trail.  We’ll go back and finish the ride someday–it’s still a goal.   Meanwhile, we got to ride the part of the Centennial Trail along Lake Coeur d’ Alene–in pouring rain, but it was in an area with lots of other people, and by moving on in bad weather to a different start point, we got a 60-mile ride on the most scenic part of the trail in decent weather instead of a 30-mile ride in freezing rain, and the prospect of a 30-mile ride back to the car the next day in wet gear.

So, to all the bike tourists among you, we leave this advice–the goal is not to “get there,” but to live to ride another day.  And, if you have a mother, to not make her worry justifiably.  The bicycle, like the airplane, is an excellent transportation mode, but even airliners are grounded in severe weather.  If you are chasing weather, or it is chasing you, there is no defeat in jumping around it or ahead of it.  After all, the bicycle is not only transportation, but transportable.