Darkness at Ahern

I've ridden Ahern enough to know that you should plan on bringing your technical game along for the ride. Throw in a dark October night and a bunch of fast riders and you know it's on...
8 of us left Chainline Cycles somewhere around 6 and by the time we got into Ahern proper, we had about 15 minutes before we needed lights. There was however, one rider who won't be named (he's from foreign land best known for Benny Hill reruns and afternoon tea) who claimed that there was no need for lights and ironically found that his light actually didn't work when he was forced to admit that it was indeed dark. Lucky for him, someone lent him a camping headlamp and he was able to soldier on. Pretty amazing feat considering that you really can't have too much light to ride Ahern and we certainly weren't waiting up for him.
Given the nature of Ahern in the dark we had all the typical minor crashes and mishaps including a broken chain, but all in all everyone made it out unscathed. If your looking for lots of tight, technical, twisty New England singletrack Ahern is a good place to start. My GPS has finally given up the ghost so I have no actual course from last night, but I was told we did 12 miles total. Below is a my artistic rendering of where we seemed to ride last night. I think it is pretty accurate except the actual circles we rode were probably a bit tighter.

Realistic simulation of actual ride

 

Next week we'll be riding Framklin Falls to try out the new extension on Mighty Chicken.