Riding the River

This past Thursday, Fred and I took our XR100's out on the Browns River. I should preface that by mentioning that we had done some prep work last week. There had been a couple big willow trees that had fallen across the river, and we had to wait for it to freeze enough so that we could stand in/on the river and cut away the branches. At that time there were still some patches of snow on the ice, it was rideable with the XR100's but we ran out of time.

So with that work done we were prepared to try it as soon as we had the right conditions. Well, Sunday we had a thaw coupled with some rain, and the river rose about 6 or so inches and refroze. It was perfect. We didn't want to take the big bikes out yet, so we ventured out on the 100's and had a blast.

We headed north, and stopped just short of a small rocky section with open water. The river is only knee deep here.

This is a VAST snowmobile trail intersection near the river, I wanted to see how far north we were. 2 miles north of the Essex town line.

The white spots are big ice crystals, really cool effect when you put your foot down and slide through 'em.

This is as far south as we got, I've skied in these farm fields from my house. Total straight line distance was roughly 3 or so miles, but river riding distance was probably more like 5.