I was looking for something interesting to ride after doing the Northern Rail Trail. I came up with the Cross New Hampshire Adventure trail (XNHAT). The website had a lot of great information and they even mailed me a map and some stickers (you also get a patch if you complete the trail...and I love patches). Of the 83 miles of the Cross New Hampshire Adventure Trail: 40.4 miles paved road, (only 10 miles on a primary road, 30 miles on quiet paved backroads), 11 miles dirt road, 15.5 miles dirt rail trail, shared with ATVs, 15 miles dirt rail trail, non-motorized only, 1.1 miles paved recreation path. I put the word out and CMS teammates Kevin Tilton and Paul Bazanchuk were both "in". A few others expressed interest but in the end the only others to join in the fun were Jim Graham and Jeff Litchfield.
I got up at 1am on Saturday morning and was in Bethel Maine ready to run at 3:30 am. I got in a nice 5m run on the rec path and north road (where we'd finish the ride). Kevin showed up at 4:30am and I drove us over to Woodsville NH (Haverhill) for the start of our ride. We met up with the others and went over the bridge to start at the Vermont border. At 6:48am we were off and riding. It was only 34 degrees but it was going to be a bright sunny day (sunrise was at 6:30am).
I had plenty of food and drink and spare clothes for the ride. I hadn't done much riding but I wanted to get this one in the books. We rolled along pretty casually for the first 10 miles before a 4 minute break to grab a drink/snack and a nature break. After that Jim and Jeff were feeling cold and pedaled off at a quicker rate. We were still feeling good and none of us wanted to push it.
We stayed on the rec trail through Lisbon and by the time we hit Littleton we couldn't see the guys up ahead. We stopped at the end of the trail (20 miles and 2 hours into the ride) for a 9 minute break to eat something and adjust layering. We missed the turn off the trail into Littleton so we never saw that the others had stopped for coffee. We rolled on picking up route 116 for a nice ride to Whitefield. The breakdown lane gave us plenty of space to ride away from the traffic. The detour to avoid a bridge out on Hazen road meant a tough little climb (285' in .3 of a mile) that brought us to the long downill and the scenic loop around the airport. We reached the Presidential rail trail parking lot at 10:09am (36.3 miles) and took 9 minutes to use the porta-johns, have some water and food and then get rolling again. At 41 miles we exited onto Meadows road, then Israel river road and (dirt) Valley road.
Then at Jefferson notch road (46.5 miles) we got back on the trail. We hit the high point on the rail trail then it was a nice even descent down into Gorham. There was a washout with the trail closed that had to be negotiated but otherwise it was steady fast riding.
After crossing route 16 and the river on a huge bridge we had a slight problem finding Hogan road. This was a road in name only, some of the roughest riding was here and I took a pretty good spill at 59 miles on a rocky uphill stretch.
Finally we hit North road for the final 19 miles of "rolling" paved road. The uphills seemed to hurt a lot more at this point. Kevin took the lead and either Paul or I just sat on his wheel. We moved pretty well and pulled into Bethel at 2:08pm. Total time for the ride was 7:20 with a moving time of 6:49 over 82 miles with 3,381' of climb. Except for my ankle and rib (from the fall) everything felt pretty good. The others rolled in about 1.5 hours later (they had stopped for coffee a couple of times) and we did the long drive back to Woodsville. Fun to get this done and recount our observations from a day well spent.
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