Today is Seattle’s bike to work day, and it’s a gorgeous sunny Friday. Seemed like the perfect day to try weaving my tallbike through downtown traffic and up the hills of my 9 mile commute!

They say that Amsterdam is bonkers for bikes, and I’ve always wanted to see it for myself, so I stopped for a day en route to Africa, and rented a classic Azor black city bike from the good folks at Bike City.

Holy soft cheese and tulips, the city did not disappoint! I cut together a short video of my three hours of blissful riding. Enjoy. (And imagine how crowded those cycle tracks must be on a warm summer day!)

Cycling Amsterdam from Tangled Nest on Vimeo.

Ok, it’s a relatively simple idea but I fell for it. I have to admit that I think this is pretty cool. “Precious” is a Specialized bike that has been outfitted with sensors that feed to a live web interface. The website shows the grade the bike is climbing or descending, the cardinal direction the bike is heading, and more. (Check the site during the day; during the night the bike, and the sensors, are still.)

In addition, in a tally reminiscent of scientist Michael Fay’s Megtransect expedition across the Congo basin, the website is tallying roadkills, honking cars, flat tires, and other vital cycling statistics in real time. And building on the temperature, humidity, grade, and map data, Precious has also been programmed to tweet various witty and relevant remarks as @yesiamprecious. (The bike currently has twice as many Twitter followers as its rider – that’s gotta smart!). I thought immediately of HAL, Wired drew a parallel to Knight Rider. You get the idea.

No Direction Home

The bike is being ridden by a woman named Janeen McCrae or “the noodleator” as a fundraiser for the Livestrong foundation, and she is also tweeting/blogging the trip at a website called No Direction Known. She had a rough day today, climbing hills in Kentucky, and I have mad respect for her, cycling solo across the country for a good cause. Her blog entries are honest, funny, and well written (though I do wish her RSS feed contained photos).

The sensor-laden bike aspect of this project is somewhat reminiscent of the Yahoo Purple Pedals bikes, which were loaded with GPS and Flickr-connected cameras, and lent to various riders as a Yahoo promotion. (Tech details on the Yahoo bikes) While those bikes had many interesting adventures, the one I remember best is the creative rider who took his, in the pre-election period, on a very carefully planned ride around Manhattan, so that the “dot every sixty seconds” automatic Yahoo map application would spell out “Obama.”

Precious was built by the interactive firm BreakfastNY, and thinking of the Yahoo project begs the question why Precious does not integrate any kind of camera. I guess some task has to be left to the rider in addition to sweating up the hills in the heat.  In any case, the country she is currently rolling through is beautiful and challenging, and her efforts deserve our support. She’s only trying to raise one dollar per mile, or $4262, which to be honest seems like a pretty low goal for a solo cross country ride, and it must be feeling especially low as those miles drag on during this section of the ride, climbing hills in the Kentucky heat. So I pitched in for a couple dozen miles tomorrow, and you should to.

Ride strong, Janeen! Say hello when you reach Seattle!

There’s a major, month-long international sporting event starting on Friday, one that I’ll be following closely. No, not the World Cup, the Tour Divide, an “ultra-cycling challenge to race self-supported along all 2,745 miles of Adventure Cycling Association’s Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.”

At 9 AM Friday, the racers will roll out of Banff, Alberta, headed for Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican border.

This year’s tour is of particular interest to us Seattle cyclists because our friend, fellow bike blogger, and general man-about-town-and-country-on-his-29er-single-speed, Kent “Mountain Turtle” Peterson, is riding his second-ever Tour Divide. Kent first rode in 2005, and held the course record for a single speed mountain bike (22 days) until last year, when the new record of 19 days was set by Chris Plesko. 51-year-old Kent hopes to best that this year, relying on a carefully selected kit of gear for 26 self-supported days and nights on his Monocog bike on the continental divide.

Why twenty six days? Well, because there’s one more detail that’s classic Kent: he rode from Issaquah to the starting line in Banff as a “prologue.” So he’s already been on the road since last Thursday, and reports today from Banff to his wife Christine that that “he feels very good about his fitness, the bike, his pack and camping gear and he’s ready to roll.”

Kent rolls out of Issaquah, accompanied by well-wishers, on his "prologue" ride to Banff.

There are multiple ways to follow Kent and the other Tour Divide riders as they make southward progress, riding a century or more a day for the next three weeks. Several other Seattle riders are also listed on the 2010 start list, and we’ll be tracking and rooting for them too. Each is wearing a beacon that puts them on the online map in real time, and Kent is updating by Twitter and other means whenever possible. Details about how to track Kent are here.

And really, there are only three words that seem appropriate to end with, the three that Kent always uses to close posts on his own poetic cycling blog.

Keep ‘em rolling!

All photos of Kent and his gear borrowed from his blog.

Yesterday I introduced the Lake Baikal Winter Circumnavigation Expedition 2010.

What kind of gear is required to ride 1800 kilometers over 43 days on ice in an average daytime temperature of -20 Centigrade? Before their departure, the team posted a summary of their equipment choices. They are on Kona Unit 29er mountain bike frames, with a variety of modifications and careful gear choices for the rugged frozen conditions of their journey.

From blog posts they wrote before departure on the Axiom website, I gleaned that they are running on Nokian Gazza Extreme studded tires, and taking a modified single speed approach to their drive-trains:

One of the unique features about our bikes that people are often curious about is the 2-speed single speed drive-train. We will be using a double chain-ring up front (34 and 32 teeth) with a single-speed cassette hub in the back with two cogs on it. (18 and 20 teeth) The chain is tensioned with adjustable sliders in the frame and there are no derailleurs. It is a standard single-speed drive-train with the exception that we have two gears to choose from. By dropping the wheel out of the frame using the quick release, we can manually move the chain from the 34/18 combination to the 32/20 combination without adjusting chain tension. In this way we have two gear choices to deal with the various terrain challenges that we may encounter.

To keep themselves from freezing, they are gearing up in:

• Smart Wool 100% Merino Wool base layer tops and bottoms
• Smart Wool 100% Merino Wool extra-thick socks
• Sherpa Adventure Gear Polartec fleece jacket
• Sherpa Adventure Gear Primaloft pants and jacket
• Hard shell windproof pant
• Insulated Shell mittens
• Windstopper Pro Balaclava (face mask)
• Ski goggles

And at the key bicycle-rider interface between feet and pedals?

We examined the systems in use by mid-west winter cyclists and Alaskan Iditabike participants, discussed the pros and cons of various shoe and pedal systems, and eventually decided that for our needs a warm winter boot matched to a flat pedal with power straps is the safest choice. Although it would be nice to use an SPD-type pedal, the risks of mechanical failure as well as the difficulty of mounting a cleat to a winter boot made us decide to keep things simple. We will be doing a lot of walking, and any hole through the sole of the shoe allows cold and moisture to penetrate the inside of the boot. The boot of choice? The Kamik Cody rated to -78 degrees Celsius.

The pedal system was a little trickier. Due to the large size of the boot we wanted to use a platform pedal, but the power straps are designed to work with standard-size pedals. With a lot of grinding with a bench grinder and Dremel tool we managed to clear away enough of the pedal body to attach the extra-long power strap mounting hardware. This system should give us plenty of contact with the pedal and provide decent efficiency while still being simple and reliable. In the photo you can see the silver areas where we had to grind away the pedal body to custom fit the power straps. The grind marks in the center are from having to angle the Dremel tool inside the pedal body to clear an area for the bolts to pass through the pedal cage.

To prepare the bikes for the trek, they had to problem-solve the fact that normal bicycle grease freezes around -15 Centigrade.

We have changed the grease in every bearing assembly on the bike: bottom brackets, hubs, pedals, headsets, and freehub bodies. Instead of a standard bicycle or automotive grease, we are using specially formulated grease that comes highly recommended by many Alaskan winter cyclists – Lubriplate Mag-1 Extreme Temperature grease rated to -50 degrees Celsius. This should keep our bearing assemblies running smooth and friction free even in the coldest temperatures.

If you skim this Russian article you can see a few more gear photos – they are using Axiom racks and bags, and it looks like they are using Solio solar chargers, some kind of Manfrotto handlebar mount for GPS units, and some traditional gear for stoves and camping.

One purpose of the expedition is to bring attention to environmental efforts in the Lake Baikal watershed.  Learn more about the organizations for which they are fund raising on this page of their website.

Roll on, guys!

The crunch of snow under your bicycle tires, the crisp tang of sub-zero wind whipping past you, the icicle beard forming as your breath condenses on your face mask, and the knowledge that there’s not another human being for dozens of frozen miles in every direction. Sound like fun? My friend David Williams drew my attention to the Lake Baikal Winter Circumnavigation 2010 expedition. This five-man team from Seattle, Oregon, and Venezuela has undertaken a 43-day trip to circumnavigate the enormous Lake Baikal in Siberia on bicycles, in sub-zero temperatures, on the ice.

The expedition’s website introduces the project:

We are currently in the process of completing the first ever human-powered winter circumnavigation of Lake Baikal on mountain bikes in 2010 to promote environmental conservation in Russia. The lake is frozen at this time and we are riding entirely on snow and ice for an estimated 43 days. Lake Baikal has never been circumnavigated by bicycle, and no one has ever made a circumnavigation by human power in winter conditions.

Lake Baikal is not only the world’s deepest lake, holding nearly a fifth of the world’s fresh water supply, but also the oldest, with an age of over 25 million years. It is home to 1,200 indigenous animal species, and is the focal point of the environmental movement in Russia. The Great Baikal Trail organization is attempting to build a recreational trail system around the lake to promote conservation, and to create a sustainable economy based on preservation of this incredibly beautiful and unique feature of our planet.

The expedition is the brainchild of Eugene, Oregon’s Christopher Pike, who spent two years living and studying in Russia on an academic exchange. While spending a year in Irkutsk (Eugene’s Russian sister city), he became very familiar with Lake Baikal and with local efforts to protect the world’s deepest and purest freshwater lake. It was there that the idea of circumnavigating the lake on bicycles, in winter, was born. An idea it has taken him five years to bring to fruition.

You can follow their progress on a map, and on Twitter, though the most comprehensive place is probably their Facebook page, where the Twitter posts appear as status updates, and where there’s a photo gallery.

They are currently twelve days into the trek, and just uploaded their first batch of photos, some of which I included above. Their latest update:

March 3-8: Days spend riding the road. We covered about 600 km of ice and snowy roads to the bay before Ust’-Barguzin. Once on the bay we decided to continue on the the lake for the remaining 60 km to Ust’-Barguzin. The lake is still covered in snow making the riding hard. According to locals this has been the most snow they have seen on the lake in the last ten years.

We expect to find better conditions in our way north. Ust’-Barguzin is the end of any available road and to complete the circumnavigation we now need to take the lake for the remaining 1000-1200 km.

Tomorrow, I’ll post a run-down of their gear choices.