Mission Accomplished

With the recent flooding of the Minnesota River, I've had a hard time staying away. There are lots of opportunities to play in this watery landscape, but since the perfect conditions don't last long one has to act fast.  The river had already crested by Saturday and was going to start coming down, a couple days make all the difference. On Sunday the water was still kind of fresh. When the water starts coming down it stagnates and is disgusting with all the rotting plant material, surface scum, and dead fish that didn't do so well in the flood. I'm not riding or playing in that shit!
      The Mission: Ride from Hwy 494 in Eagan to the Bloomington Ferry Bridge and back.

WEEEEE 

This is my second bike that will need a complete overhaul

This is as hard as riding through deep snow

This is my third bike that will need a complete overhaul

1st swim

It's still over his head here even though he's only ten feet from shore

This was the last of the deeps

 At the beginning of the week I rode the Sibley Road from Cedar and also Bloomington Ferry to 35W, all I needed was to connect the two, on a long, wet ride. Early morning Sunday is when I hatched the plan. I went out on scouting ride by myself to see what the river levels were. The Sibley Road was too dangerous on account of strong current in deep water through lots of trees. I decided to check out the north side that went along Long Meadow Lake. This section had axle, to bottom of handle bar deep, water, that went for about a mile. I had my route now, all I needed to do was get some other suckers to join me. Steve was the only one brave (available) enough to embark on the challenge. We met at 5:30 pm under 494 and rolled out. Riding the first mile in two to three feet of water was awesome and had us laughing like a couple school girls. From there we had several miles of dry but sandy, perfect for the fat-bike, single track. We did our first swim a mile or so before 35W. From there we rode intermittent sections of flooded trail and gravel road until we came to Nine Mile Creek and did our big swim. When we got to the creek there was a motor boat with a couple guys fishing and a kayaker padding around. They saw us coming down the trail and gave us strange looks like WTF. I picked up on this, and  for the maximum effect rode my bike right into the water without breaking stride and began swimming. Now they were really like, WTF. We waved, said hello, and kept swimming, disappearing off into the flooded trees. Shortly thereafter the elevation came up and we were cruising sweet single track all by ourselves. We had one more swim and several other flooded sections to ride on the remainder of the trail. It took three hours to ride one way! It was now getting dark, so we opted for a road ride back to the vehicles, which took an hour and returned us in the dark.