Ah, the autumn leaves, a panoply of warm colors to soften the cooling breeze, collecting in piles of idyllic charm, crunching underfoot. People, known as “leaf peepers,” make special trips north just to see the show, the bright yellows, deep oranges, and dramatic reds. This explosion of color heralds the change in seasons, a last celebration of sorts before winter pulls us into its cold embrace.
Of course, those leaves will kill you if you’re not careful.
Those of you riding trails through deciduous forests will know this, especially if the deciduous forests you frequent were once covered by the Laurentide ice sheet, leaving them littered with rocks, small, large and in-between. Once all those pretty leaves drift down from their tired branches, they camouflage the forest floor, concealing a million rocks that have been dying to throw you off your bike all summer.
Like sharks in the water.
Dead leaves are a critical part of the ecosystems the fall in. Sun, rain, snow and time turn them to fresh to soil. This is one of the great ironies of modern American lawn care, that the multitudes dutifully remove the very thing their yards need, in favor of bagged fertilizers, but that’s a different topic for a different website. My point is that the very process those leaves are engaged in, necessary as it is, also endangers riders of bicycles, because it covers the trails with a coat of traction-defeating nonsense.
Fall riding is a whole ‘nother thing. All those hot corners you rolled through in the summer are now slip-n-slide fun. Every deviation from straight offers the opportunity for a two-wheeled slide into the brush. Or a tree. Whatevs.
The cruelty of this is not that you might legitimately sustain a concussion, but rather that the year’s most perfect riding temperatures are coupled with a need to dial back your shreddery. I spent the summer tuning up my skills and ratcheting up my fitness. Now I gotta pull the brakes early and clench my butt cheeks through corners, because the arboreal fantasy land I spent most of my time in is as slick as freshly Zamboni’ed ice.
Of course, cast in another light, the leaves are there to remind me I’m not as clever as I think. They’re there to keep the lid on. “Slow down,” they whisper as they eddy in the wind. “Is this really when you want to be recovering from injury? In the dying light? In the creeping cold?”
These are some hyper-articulate and thoughtful leaves. I live in New England after all.
And anyway, it’s fun to ride fast through a natural chicane of tightly twisting trail, but it might be more fun to suddenly break loose with both wheels and then, quite without meaning to, regain your traction and balance and roll away off down the trail like nothing happened.
Back at home, where we have a small lawn and a big garden, we leave the leaves where they fall. We throw compost into the mix, and we wait for winter to convert that concoction into rich soil. It’s the stuff of next year’s growth. It’s the stuff of next year’s traction.
Dry Oak Leaves. A few layers of ‘em. Like black ice. But I must say that they give trails that I know intimately a whole new personality. I find the newness, the uncertainty, the moments of drift and grab at the last possible instant quite mentally engaging and exciting. And the temps are perfect.
Nature’s rejuvenation process is more important than being able to mountainbike without thinking.