When I ride on the deteriorating asphalt roads near home, I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen as oil and roadbuilding get more expensive. Will more roads revert to gravel? Our own county is already letting some revert to gravel for budgetary reasons.

If that happens to a lot of roads I figure it won’t affect my bicycling too much. I often like to ride on gravel, anyway. I go a little slower on gravel, and it sometimes seems good to relax my pace a little. If I did it all the time I’d want wider tires, but on well-packed gravel I get along fine with my 700×32c tires, at least when it’s not raining. Washboards aren’t so good, of course.

But last month I rode some gravel roads in the southeast part of Illinois. That experience made me look with greater apprehension on a world of fewer paved roads. Like the road pictured above, in Wabash County (Googlemap below). To save a mile or so, I tried taking this gravel shortcut. But so many of the gravel roads in this part of the world seemed to have loose gravel of the type that had been worn smooth in streams — probably glacial streams. It doesn’t seem to pack down. It was all I could do to keep riding — and sometimes when I didn’t plan well I had to get off and walk my bike over to another side of the road that might have a tire path that was packed slightly better.

That’s not why I stopped at the above place, even though it was a relief not to ride on that surface. I stopped there to eat the lunch I had packed. It didn’t seem that anyone in the old farmhouse would mind, and there were no dogs to come barking at me. But as soon as I could, I got back to paved roads and stayed there, even though it cost me a few more miles. (The total for that day was 57 miles.)

The other day I happened upon an article that suggests I should get used to gravel. It’s titled, “Peak asphalt: The return of gravel roads” and is rom a blog called “The Oil Drum: Europe — Discussions about Energy and Our Future.”

It seems that reversion to gravel roads is not just something that’s happening in economically depressed Michigan. It’s happening in other parts of rural America. There are also a few reports of it happening in Europe — like in Finland, where winters are especially hard on asphalt. In other countries like Italy, people are simply learning to live with potholes.

It’s not that the world is running out of bitumen for asphalt. There is plenty of bitumen to be had. The problem is the energy and money it takes to get it:

If it is bitumen that we need, there is plenty of it. Just the Canadian tar sands are made mostly of bitumen and are said to contain at least one trillion barrels of it – probably more. To this amount, we can add Venezuela’s tar sands, with at least half a trillion barrels. With tar sands, the main problem is to obtain liquid fuels, but if it is bitumen that we want, it is much easier. At present, bitumen doesn’t seem to be lacking in the world market and some projections for asphalt indicate that production may be rising in the coming years.

The problem, as usual, is not one of quantity, but one of energy . With minerals, we are not running out of anything except of the energy needed for extraction. It is the principle that I called the universal mining machine. Bitumen doesn’t seem to be an exception; we are not running out of bitumen, but we have increasing problems in being able to afford it; just as with a lot of other minerals.

The author concludes with some speculation about the future of automobile travel:

In the end, the problem seems to be that peak oil – arriving or already arrived – is placing a tremendous strain on the world’s economy. Because of this strain, the kind of money used for maintaining roads is quickly disappearing and the result is the return of unpaved roads. It may be planned or not; the end result, in any case, is the same. So, it is likely that in the coming years we’ll see more and more roads returning to gravel, as it was commonplace in the Western World up to about 50 years ago. When most roads were not paved, cars and trucks had much softer suspension systems and lighter wheels; we may see a comeback of this kind of vehicles which, by their nature, are not made for high speeds. After all, gravel roads don’t mean the end of transportation. We’ll just have to slow down considerably, and that may not be a bad thing.

I suppose parts of this might apply to bicycles, too.

Some local people near my home have been complaining about the practice of reverting roads to gravel, talking as though it’s a case of government waste and inefficiency. I don’t think so, though I suppose it doesn’t help that our particular county road commission had some management problems a few years back. The problem is not just a local problem.

But instead of complaining about the deterioration and loss of our paved roads, I do something about it. I get out and enjoy what we have while it lasts.

googlemap

The red pushpin in the above googlemap marks the place where I stopped. It’s in what once was Friendsville Township, Wabash County. I haven’t been able to find any information about the people who lived at the abandoned farmstead. The location might be part of what is called Decker’s Prairie in the 1883 county history. That history says that two brothers surnamed Corrie, who had come from Scotland, purchased a lot of land on Decker’s Prairie in 1818. A 1951 plat map shows that some parcels of land were still owned by Corrie’s 130 years later. One such parcel was the one across the side road that goes to the left of the one I had come on. The 1975 plat map (the latest one available at HistoricMapWorks) shows some nearby parcels owned by Corrie’s, though they aren’t the same parcels.

Ken Steinhoff’s post about Bicycle Gardens Sprouting Up All Over made me think of this scene from a ride on August 31. In this land of corn and soybeans one might get the idea that life is strictly business — agribusiness. Then one sees a bit of whimsy, like this red bike left to grow in a bed of flowers along a gravel road.

I had started in Peru this morning, and ended up in Ohio. It wasn’t that long a ride, though. Those are towns in Illinois. We had picked this part of Illinois because it was near enough to O’Hare airport, where we needed to be later in the afternoon.

googlemap

About a mile ahead of the bicycle was one of my main destinations for the morning — a small piece of road that was the remnant of an old treaty line.

This morning I rode from Peru to Dad Joe Grove, then ended the outing in Ohio. Ohio, Illinois, that is. From there we drove to O’Hare airport, and now we’re back home. Back to work tomorrow.

Yesterday I hadn’t even known there was a Dad Joe Grove. I found out about it in the motel last night while trying to figure out the location of Boyd’s Grove. I had Boyd’s Grove marked at a couple of locations on my maps, and it turned out both of them were wrong. But the right location was too far away for a ride this morning.  So I went to Dad Joe Grove instead.   I’ll save Boyd’s Grove  for another time.

Tonight I found a great web site about the Galena Trail and Coach Road, which has additional information about Boyd’s Grove and other such places. I don’t know why I didn’t find this web earlier. It certainly wasn’t because I hadn’t looked for such a thing. But better late than never. It ought to be a great resource for future rides in my favorite parts of Illinois.

Today’s mileage: 31. 3-day weekend mileage: 134. YTD: 1674.5

The Illinois official bicycle maps are excellent – still the best ones I know of even though some other midwestern states have also come out with good maps in recent years. The green roads are the ones rated the best, the orange ones are good, too, and the red ones should usually be avoided.

But what about the gray roads? The Illinois maps leave those as an adventure for the rider. Often they’re gravel. But the one in Putnam County circled in red (above) is different. It no longer exists as a road. At least the south part doesn’t.

If there really was a road, it would go straight ahead, down across the creek bottom. But it doesn’t look like a road has gone that way for a long time. (Somewhere in the woods along that creek was what was known as Ramsey’s Indians — a stand of poplar trees that a Ramsey was said to have mistaken for Indians during the Black Hawk war scare.)

Then there are the sections like this. Today (well, yesterday) after seeing that the road along the creek near Ramsey’s Indians didn’t even exist, I wondered what I would find here. If the bridge existed and there was a gravel road, I’d take it, because it would save me several miles, including a mile of backtracking into a mild wind.

But in this case, it turned out that not only was there a road, but it was a paved road! Nice. And there was another one like that, too, on the border between Putnam and Marshall counties.

Miles today: 71. YTD mileage: 1643.5

This afternoon I stopped here, just south of Prairie Center, Illinois, because my front tire had gone flat. Earlier I had ridden along the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and now was on my way to Shabbona State Park, to revisit the scene of the “Indian Creek Massacre” of May 21, 1832.

Alas, the sun was about down by the time I got there.  But it’s really a better place to take photos in the early morning sun, anyway.

Indian Creek itself still had a little sunlight, but the park and the sites of the killings are on the other side of the creek, in the shade of the trees.

Today’s mileage: 32. YTD mileage: 1572.5

Just before my brief, aborted trip earlier this week, I got a Nikon D60 camera. Someone at work had called my attention to the fact that SLR cameras had now come down in price. The D60 was within the range I was authorized to spend, and it’s a small enough camera that it can work in my handlebar bag. A few other things had to go to make room for it, though.

Now I have to get used to using an SLR again, and learn how to take advantage of digital SLR. The above photo was not quite the effect I was trying for. On this and other photos, I wanted a little more depth of field than I got. But it turned out OK here in that the farm building in the background seems not to have had any connection with settlement-era history, anyway. From the plat maps it looks like the place wasn’t even a farmstead site until some time well into the 20th century.

googlemap

I suppose it doesn’t look much like prairie. We had camped at Morraine View State Park. From old maps, it looks like the route along the south of the park more or less followed an old tree line. There was a big grove of trees to the north, and prairie to the south. You can still see a difference on the satellite view.

My route for the day is shown in red. YTD mileage: 791.5

My bike is looking almost human again, though I don’t have the fenders back on it yet. I think I’ll leave them off for a while, even though some rain is forecast for later this week when I hope to be riding again.

Well, that didn’t work so well. We’re back home tonight, after one night in McLean County, Illinois. We were planning to spend most of the week there and in other parts of Illinois, but it’ll have to wait for another time. All I got was one 20+ mile bike ride today. (The bike with its odometer is still on the car. I don’t want to handle it again until I can see what I’m touching.)

I didn’t get to any new destinations. I started the day by visiting a couple of places I had ridden to back in Fall 2005. The above photo shows one of them.

The cows here are grazing at the edge of the Sangamon River, near Arrowsmith. Just as I got off my bike to take a photo, a calf that had been grazing with the others fell down the bank and landed on its back close to the water. You’d have to look pretty carefully at the photo to see it. I took several photos, but after a while the cows seemed to get agitated. They were aware of my presence, and started running around — something I figured they shouldn’t be doing on such a hot day. The temperature was in the low-mid 90s, and the humidity was high. There was a bull with them, too, who did not seem to be as agitated as the cows, but I moved on.

That was nothing, though, compared to the excitement back in 1730. The French had been trying for nearly 20 years to exterminate the Fox (Mesquaki) people, and along with native allies, had them surrounded here. Not in the foreground where the cattle are grazing, but further downstream, near the white farm buildings. The Mesquaki people were holed up in in trenches and excavations along the bank of this stream, and it looked like the end had come. The term “genocide” is often tossed about carelessly in descriptions of European-Native conflicts, but in this case it is an accurate one. The French were trying to eliminate the Fox people entirely. They almost succeeded here, but some people escaped during a lightning storm. And some of the Native allies of the French were reluctant to track them all down and kill them all. So some escaped, and 102 years later, descendants of the remnant who got away constituted a large portion of Black Hawk’s followers.

There’s a marker about it on the other side of the farm buildings. It should be stated, by the way, that this is not an undisputed location for what was the last big battle of the Fox wars. But archaeological evidence shows that some big conflict took place here, and that French soldiers were involved. If it was some other event that took place here, the historical record does not tell us what it possibly could have been.

I had been having trouble with my bike a few miles before I got to the site. It looked like one of the roads had some time earlier been given a new coat of chip-and-tar gravel. Some of the gravel was still on the road. But it seemed a lot of that gravel was getting caught up between tires and fenders, making a lot of noise. Even though I should have been able to avoid the loose gravel – most of it had already cleared from the car tire tracks — it seemed I couldn’t.

I got off at one point and saw that my tires had gravel stuck to them all around the circumference. I had never seen anything like this before. Was it my Schwalbe Marathon tires that behaved differently in hot weather than my Continental Top Touring tires used to? I had hopes that the tires would eventually clear themselves from this stuff, but even though I soon reached roads that didn’t seem to have a coating of fresh gravel this year, the problem got worse. It was causing extra friction that made riding harder.

The above photo is where I stopped after a long, gentle climb to a high point between two different creek drainages. It was a hot day — in the 90s — but I’ve gone on long rides in those temperatures before. I’ve found that I can manage OK if I drink plenty of water, pay careful attention to how I’m feeling, and pace myself extra carefully. So I stopped in the shade at the high point, and took a few photos.

When I tried to start again, I found that so much tar and gravel was now caught between fenders and wheels, that the wheels would barely turn. At that point I called Myra. I told her how her the hot weather was causing a problem and I didn’t know what to do about it. She was in Bloomington, shopping, and it would take her a while to get out here, so I said I’d walk the bike up to State Route 9 and wait. But walking the bike was even worse. It would pick up even more gravel and tar, such that the wheels wouldn’t turn at all.

It was mostly downhill to SR-9, so I got on the bike and pedalled to force enough of the gunk off of the wheels so I could ride. Big chunks came off, and I left a visible trail on the road, but I could move.

I took this photo when I got to SR-9. I am not sure that it was the brakes that got me to a stop. While I waited I tried cleaning some of it off, but I didn’t get far. Big chunks dripped off, but any time I moved the bike I picked up more. Finally, I got to wondering if I couldn’t ride on SR-9, which seemed to have a better quality of pavement. I don’t know if the asphalt has a higher melting temperature, or if it’s because it contained more stones, or what, but I was able to ride toward Bloomington on that road. There were only two cassette gears that were free enough of asphalt and stones to work, but I could move. Unfortunately, most of my historical destinations are not on that kind of road.

Myra caught up with me when I was a couple miles down the road. We took the bike back to the campsite. I got myself cleaned up (my clothes also had tar on them) – then we went to Bloomington where we could get a bite to eat and get some internet, and where I learned that the temperature forecast was even worse now than when we had left home. We considered various options — such as my trying to get in some rides in the mornings before temperatures get so hot — but I wasn’t so sure even that would work when temperatures are like this day after day. Finally we decided to go home, where it will be easier to clean up my bike. (The car needs some cleaning, too, where chunks dripped off.)

The temperatures are not quite so high here. It’s nice living downwind of Lake Michigan. Maybe I’ll at least get in an overnight ride close to home.

The town of Iroquois was the end of the day’s ride of 72 miles. It was a long ride, but it has taken more time to blog about it than it did to ride it.

There was a little park alongside the highway. After taking a few photos we put the bicycle on the top of the car. A young man came over and asked if we were thru-bikers. We weren’t of course. I haven’t done much of that kind of riding lately. But he told us that a lot of thru-bikers stay overnight and that Iroquois is marked on the cross-country bicycling maps as a place for bicyclers to stay. He pointed to the far end of the park and said something about showers and restrooms. That is good to know and I’ll definitely keep it in mind.

I just now looked it up at crazyguyonabike.com. Apparently the Adventure Cycling Association maps say to call the mayor when you get to Iroquois, and he will unlock the restrooms for you. Moni, who I know from the phred bicycle touring list tells about it with photos here. And a Paul Moore does the same here:

No, this isn’t the place for bicycling tourists. It’s an old jail that has been moved to the park. I think the place for bicycle tourists is somewhere on the other side of it.

In 1832 19 members of Captain Joseph Orr’s militia company of mounted rangers were “detached to post at Iroquois.” Whether they camped on this very same spot, I don’t know. I would guess they camped a little closer to the river, for easy access to water. But this park would have been a good spot if it had existed then.

More Aug 3. When I got to the Illinois border, the windmills came to an end. In the photo above, Illinois is on the left side of the road, and Indiana on the right.

One of the things I looked forward to in Illinois was using the excellent bicycle maps put out by the Department of Transportation. I have paper fold-up maps from four years ago, but those are no longer distributed. In some ways it’s not quite as nice, but you can now download them here as PDFs, county-by-county. The above is a snippet of the online map of Iroquois County. I’ve outlined my route in yellow.

The best bicycle routes are the green ones. The red ones are good ones to avoid, though I have found that it depends. There are some red ones I would not care to ride on, ever, and some that are usable at the right time of day and week.

I was curious about route 1300N, which is a brighter red on my paper map than on the online one. What is a country road like that, in what is a very sparcely populated and sparcely traveled area, doing in that color?

I took a photo as I rode past on 3000E, on my way north. It’s a concrete road with some cracks and grass growing in it. Is that really so dangerous to ride on? It reminded me of a type of road I had seen when we moved to central Illinois in 1970. There were some one-lane concrete roads out in the country where, if you met an oncoming car, you’d have to move over and put your right wheels in the gravel. It would be best not to meet an oncoming car at the top of a hill in one of those. This road is like those, though it seems somewhat wider than those I remember.

Maybe the bike route raters thought it was too dangerous on general principles. You wouldn’t want a bike meeting a car on a hill. Never mind that there are no hills in this part of Illinois. If I had known it was like this, I might have not ridden out of my way to avoid the road. (The windmills in the distance are across the border — in Indiana.)

One of Wednesday’s articles is titled, “Get your kicks on Route 66.” Back in September 2005 I got a kick out of riding on Route 66 myself, but in a place a little further west in Illinois than those mentioned by Roger.

It was on a weekend ride from New Salem village to the site of the last big battle of the Fox Wars in 1730, at Arrowsmith.

Myra may have told me about the archaeology museum in Elkhart before I started. In any case, that’s where I was headed. Then I’d take Route 66 up to one of many places where settlers forted up at the time of Black Hawk war.

Out on the prairie, hills have a slightly different meaning. Elkhart Hill is off in the distance in this photo, to the right of the farmstead with the grove of trees. The town of Elkhart is just below it.

Back in the early 1970s when we were teachers at one of the Lutheran schools in Danville, we used to drive through this country often on our way to Camp Cilca, north of Springfield in the direction of New Salem. I didn’t care much for the prairies back then. Now that I’ve taken up bicycle touring I love them, though I often look for the little hills, such as they are, and for the waterways.

Myra and I seldom get together for lunch on these rides, but once in a while we happen to find ourselves together in the same place at lunchtime. This was one of those rare times. It helps that she’s sometimes interested in the same things that I am.

The place was just the combo we needed — an archaeological museum and a bakery. It was run by a husband-wife team (who weren’t there at the time). He is an independent archaeologist who studies the settlement era, and she runs the bakery. It’s just off Route 66.

I don’t remember exactly what I had for lunch there, except that it was great. The museum was excellent, too — one with a lot of detail on display. Too many museums these days are plagued with too much whitespace, so to speak. This one was packed with cases of artifacts and explanatory material — but it wasn’t cluttered or disorganized.

The sign was on the wall inside the bakery. It’s something that was from a previous era of tourism.

After leaving the museum, Myra and I parted ways. I rode along Route 66 to Lawndale, and then over towards Dewitt. It was completely dark by the time I got to the general vicinity of the campground, and I got lost. But that’s another story.

I see that the museum has moved this year, to a place near New Salem. It’s probably a better location for tourist traffic. Route 66 isn’t quite what it used to be. The web site doesn’t say whether the bakery still exists. I hope it does.

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