NCC Thursday Hilltown Gravel series: #1

After a cold and wet start of the day, the weather cleared up and it was in the sixties by the time we lined for the start of the first Hilltown Gravel ride of the season. Tim, Brant, Chris, Steve, David and myself had gathered at the Conway Ballpark parking lot. Most of us were dressed in shorts with an extra upper body layer.

The route brought us to the first gravel section on Emerson in Conway. A road that sneakily gets steeper and steeper, hence a good wamup for the long and steep climb up Pine Hill. We had a regroup breather at the MacLeishes house. After a quick peak at mtn Monadnock we continued our climb. The gravel was still pretty wet from the rain earlier in the day.

Once we came down Pine Hill we headed towards Ashfield via Persick and Baptist corner. Persick’s gravel section had some wet dirt, which sucked, literally. We then turned into Bellus and I pointed out the Christmas tree farm. It was mentioned that DAR was a good source for Christmas trees as well, I think/hope it was meant as a joke. Before bombing down Bellus we did a quick detour to look a the powerlines vista.

The dirt section of Murray was in pretty good condition and we were rewarded with a view of 6 deer in the fields on the top, Steve was suspicious about them not moving at all, and mentioned something about cardboard cutouts, but once the deer had seen enough of us, and showed us their white tails, we agreed they were for real.

We finished Murray with a rt 116 crossing up Bullet. Which is always a fun climb especially the first 100 yards, The descent last year was tricky with parts of it washed out, but today the route was in great shape. This set us up for the last major climb of the ride, up and over Main Poland. There were some sections regraded, but traffic had already packed it down nicely. And while regrouping at the top, we were discussing how the rocks were split to make the road go through: drills, sticks of dynamite and glaciers were suggested.

The descent down was fun and fast as usual and with a quick stop at Conway wooden bridge we wrapped up our ride along Ives and Pleasant. We had a quick at the stone/bird statue at Academy Hill, we decided against riding into its field, as it got dark fast. Instead we wrapped up our first edition of this year.

Next week’s NCC Hilltown Gravel route will start again in Conway and amongst others will include Roaring Brook road.

See activity on Strava. This is a cross post from the NCC website