Glacial river valley

May continues on its somewhat erratic way.  Today was quite nice but there is a front moving in which some predictions say will produce rain for the next five or six days totaling perhaps as much as six inches.  If the predictions are correct that's going to be a week of mostly pretty hard rain.

I might be off the bike for a week again so I wanted to try something new today.  We had nearly 80 and an east southeast wind when I started out.

A southeast wind often produces a ride down to the Capitol but today I didn't feel like that big pull on Como between Dale and Rice to get up the quite high overpass over the railroad tracks.  I was kinda just riding around and finally settled on a destination goal of the Arlington Avenue entrance to the Gateway Trail.  I haven't been on the Gateway for at least a couple of years.

The problem with going over there is that to get from my house to the east side one must cross one of the major local iterations of a prehistoric glacial river.  Crossing that wide and deep valley requires riding up nasty hills both on the way out and on the way back.  I some times don't feel like doing that.  As noted, I hadn't been there for a couple of years at least.

One of the geologists who worked there for a while (not the Geology Guy) once told me that the valley was an iteration of glacial River Warren, the outflow channel from glacial Lake Agassiz, but I am not so sure any more.  It is clearly a major outwash bed but being as it is east of the Mississippi it seems more likely to me to be an outflow channel from glacial Lake Duluth or perhaps Lake Grantsburg.

More geology there than most of you care about.

I got across on the ride out but after arriving at the entrance to the Gateway I still had plenty more miles to ride so I rode down the mile and a half or so to the western terminus of the state trail.

The last time I was there there were people living in those woods.  Since then there is a major construction project widening the freeway (on the right of the photo).  Also, a new street has been punched in off to the left of the trail resulting in some new warehouse type structures and a fence.  This has significantly reduced the available liveable acreage in those woods and it appears that everyone has moved out.

I also came upon this.  I remember the construction project but didn't realize they were doing this new underpass.

Fairly obviously there is some future plan for rerouting of the state trail over there.

More particularly, careful examination will discover a profile of an individual sitting on the ground on the left near the far end of the tunnel.

They may have made the woods unlivable but they haven't driven all of the old residents out of the neighborhood.

I headed further east, and eventually rode all the way out to milepost 5.  I made a detour out to Lake Phalen.  Here is a LOOK at the north end of that lake.

Turnaround came at the Ramsey County satellite courthouse in Maplewood.

I rode all the way to the top of the bridge crossing White Bear Avenue to get that photo even though I probably didn't have to.  The thing about hills though is that once you start up it just seems like riding to the top is the best thing to do.

I used Wheelock Parkway on the way back and had to climb back out of the valley on that hill.  It is unpleasant, gradual at the bottom but stiff enough to get me to shift down a couple of times, then quite steep through the middle (although not long) which always tricks me into using up too much of my energy.  At the top of the steep part there is a false summit, it flattens out considerably but then continues a still unpleasant uphill bit for another block or so.  I don't ride it often enough to have muscle memory of how to climb it but I have ridden it often enough to know that no hike a bike will be necessary.

It was a good day to be out.  What day isn't a good day to be out?