Guest Post: Stories in Stone, Bikejuju Style

And now a guest post from Seattle author, naturalist, blogger, and cyclist David B. Williams:

If you wondered what Mr. Juju was hinting at in his last post, the answer is stone. Paris-Roubaix, Mt. Ventoux, and Breaking Away are united by their reliance on rock and by my passion for it. By way of introduction, I am the author of the recently published book, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology.The book explores the connection between people and rock by focusing on how we use rock as a building material. Chapters range from the brownstones of New York to a petrified wood gas station in Colorado and the Carrara marble (Michelangelo’s favorite stone) that once clad an 80-story skyscraper in Chicago.

Tom was kind enough to let me write a Bikejuju post uniting my passion for biking and rocks. I am a geologist but I have also long been a cyclist, having started touring with my parents back in the mid-1970s. In 1983, I put together my own bike, building the wheels and buying parts, including a pair of Campy hubs in Italy. I still have and still ride my beautiful blue Mercian. In the late 1980s, I ended up Moab, Utah, where I spent time working as a park ranger at Arches National Park and also taught geology programs at Canyonlands Field Institute. In that region, it’s hard to miss the bike-rock connection while riding the ups and downs of the Slickrock Trail (the loop rolls across the 185-million-year old Navajo Sandstone). Now as a Seattle resident, I ride regularly not only for training but for commuting, going to meetings, and shopping. It’s still my favorite mode of travel.

In regard to biking, there are several connections in my book Stories in Stone. The prime one is my focus on a white, 330-million-year old limestone quarried around Bloomington, Indiana. Known as the Salem Limestone, it is the most commonly used building stone in the United States; famous Salem-clad structures include the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Empire State Building, and Grand Central Station.

Cyclists enjoy Grand Central Terminal's limestone facade up close during a "summer streets" day when some Manhattan streets are closed to motor vehicles.

But more germane to Bikejuju readers’ interests, the Salem Limestone is the star of one of the great movies of all time, Breaking Away. The four protagonists, Dave, Mike, Moocher, and Cyril, wile away their summer in Bloomington, including swimming in an abandoned quarry.

Unfortunately, you cannot access that quarry anymore; too many people did get to it, which didn’t please the property owners. You can, however, get very close to the nearby hole left behind by quarrying 224,000 cubic feet of Salem Limestone for the Empire State Building.

I have just one complaint about the movie. Although Breaking Away does show a quarry yard and discusses the use of the stone, none of our gang of four fine fellows ever mentions the coolest feature of the Salem. The limestone is chock full of fossils, such as crinoid stems (which look like poker chips), bryozoans (which look like RiceChex), and brachiopods (which look like clams). They all lived and died in warm, clear sea that once covered what we now call the Midwest. Oh well, we geologists can always hope for perfection.

Another bike-stone connection concerns stones known as San Pietrini, or little Saint Peters, playing on his role as the rock of Christianity. San Pietrini are the cobblestones famous for helping all roads lead to Rome. The stone for the cobbles comes from 277,000-year old basalt flows that erupted from the Faete peak of the Alban Hills volcano, southeast of Rome. In late May of this year, the little St. Petes attracted attention on the final day of the Giro d’Italia, when race leader Denis Menchov took a rather nasty tumble on the wet stones. Showing heroic perseverance, he got up, finished the stage, and won the overall race. It was a truly stunning moment.

As most cycling enthusiasts know, the most famous cobbles are the ones ridden in the “Hell of the North,” the Paris-Roubaix race. Known in French as pavé, the cobbles come in three varieties: granite from Brittany, limestone from the Hainaut province of Belgium (dubbed bluestone because of their color), and a sandstone from Artois. Of the three, the granite resists erosion best, but no matter which one one rides, it is not pleasant.

First run in 1896, the Paris-Roubaix race suffered its first loss of pavé in 1939 as the cobble roads began to be paved. World War II stopped the repaving projects but they picked up after the war and by 1965 only 22 km of cobbles remained. Fortunately, saner souls realized that the pavé was what made the Paris-Roubaix one of the great races.

French volunteers from the organization Les Amis de Paris–Roubaix - "the friends of the Paris-Roubaix race" - maintaining the pavé.

Organizers sought out forgotten country roads with cobbles, and in recent years have renovated and repaired kilometers of cobbles. Their success at romancing the stone is something for all cyclists to smile about, especially ones who realize that without good rock we wouldn’t have good riding.

Pave as shot by Flickr user Benche

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Read more in David’s great book Stories in Stone, or on his blog, and while you are at it, also pick up his book The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle.