Wednesday

Big road ride today, that's been a while. We're checking out the Neal Smith / Ding Darling Refuge trail today, which connects Ankeny and Polk City to Downtown DSM. There's an easy potential for 60+ miles here but we would be slightly time limited toward evening. Doing this as an out-and-back makes it easy to manage time because you just use up 40%-50% of your total time and, provided you're not so burned out that you slow down, just head back and everything works out about right.

Heading out, we use the new cycle/ped bridge again. I can never remember what it's called but I like the construction. It's made of three arches, two of which are lying down opposing each-other with cables up to the vertical arch. Some more pictures at this site here: 

Rolling on some inter-urban trail past the Botanical Center where there's major construction going on.

Out on the Neal Smith trail, there's a large section seeing major shoreline erosion from the river. My first guess would be that this is caused by the river running at an elevated level but there were permanent warning signs installed well ahead on the trail so there must have been a steep disintegrating bank here for a while.

I don't have a great picture of this but just to the left of Corrine's head in the shot below, there's a small Asian man jumping as high as he can, trying to pull a few mulberries off the lower hanging branches. There were several areas out here that had what looked like a giant oil slick/stain on the pavement because of all the mulberries.

We make it to Saylorville Lake, which greets us with a nice long curvy descent through open meadowy landscape. Somewhere around here is where the big climbing started and continued to Polk City. My Garmin showed something like 1,300ft of elevation gain / 2600ft elevation change. At one point on the way back, I was descending at over 30mph while still on the brakes!

Arriving at a campground that we passed through, there was a slow speed zone. 

And speed limit demolished (while pretty much coasting, haha).

Another big drop out of the forest into the sunshine along this dam. I don't know what lake is on the other side, it's not Saylorville anymore. 

We turned around here at Polk City in order to ensure enough time to get back. About 45miles for the day and a little over 3hrs moving time. My Garmin also calculated that this took 2,600 calories! Time for some ice cream. 

Lots of wildlife along the refuge, including tame deer. 

While fording flood water across the trail, I followed these baby ducks for a while before they headed off into the river.