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| Tom Chappell | News | Family | Friends | Trivia | Contacts | Bookmarks |
My friend Chris Gibson likes to read Aviation Safety magazine. He likes to read it on airplanes. He likes to offer spare copies to his fellow passengers. Aviation Safety is just stuffed with articles detailing exactly how some poor dumb bozo flew to his death, and one of the things that it likes to point out is that an accident is usually not the result of a single error - very often it's a long chain of mistakes and coincidences, all fitting together in one magic way.
All of which I mention purely as a non-sequitur. I'd like to emphasize that it will have Nothing Whatsoever to do with the story of what happened when Tam Pham and I first attempted the San Gabriel / Rio Hondo river loop, an 87 mile path of mostly bicycle paths mostly along huge rivers in Los Angeles. In brief, it starts up in the San Bernardino mountains, goes down the San Gabriel river bike path, takes the Rio Hondo fork to the L.A. River, L.A. River to Long Beach, surface streets to the San Gabriel, and then back up the San Gabriel to the starting point.
My friend Tam Pham recently told me that he was up for a bicycle ride, and when I asked, "How long a ride?" he said, "I am Tam Pham! I can do any ride that a fat dopey old Mac guy can do!" He had ridden a century (a 100-mile one-day bicycle ride) from Los Angeles to San Diego several years ago with my friend Tom Harvey on similarly short notice, so I felt like there was at least a slim chance that he could make it. The plan was that we would ride the big loop, and then tack on 13 miles to make it into an official century if we were up to it at the end.
The trouble started when I got up that morning. My bicycle had a flat front tire, the first flat of its young life. Still, one flat in 470 miles wasn't too bad, and perhaps it was only a slow leak, anyway. I had my trusty spare inner tube and a full patch kit, so I just pumped it up, and put the bike on my car, and took off for Tam Pham's house.
I had wanted to get an early start (short winter days!), but Tam said that he wouldn't be able to get up before 8:00am. As it turned out, he was still asleep when I knocked on his door, the first of a long line (or perhaps I should use the word chain ) of delays that would plague us as the day progressed.
Tam puttered around his apartment, and insisted that we stop at Bagelmania for some bagels (both for breakfast and to take along on the ride), as well as stopping at Lucky supermarket for granola bars. Tam had gotten rid of his old bike a few years before, but his brother, who races mountain bikes, had agreed to let Tam borrow his titanium bike for the ride. This meant another delay as we drove over to Tam's parents' house, followed by another short delay to change the pedals from clipless (which require special shoes) to standard. Finally we were ready to drive to the start of the ride: the San Gabriel mountains, about three miles northeast of the junction of the 210 freeway and the 605.
So, at about 11:00am, we started off, and almost immediately we had problems with getting lost. First we missed a turn of the bicycle path near the cactus preserve, and had to backtrack, and then, after a very nice ride along the top of Santa Fe Dam, we got lost again when I misread the directions and we missed a turn on some surface streets. After another delay as we stopped to buy Kleenex, we got unlost, and then my front tire, which had been holding up pretty well, went flat - another delay. I swapped the damaged tube with my spare, and we were off again, finally rejoining the river trails.
Now, the San Gabriel River split in two about 100 years ago when some Mexicans dug an irrigation ditch in the wrong place, and the plan was that we would take the old fork, now called the Rio Hondo, down to Long Beach, then take surface streets over to the new fork, which has appropriated the San Gabriel name, and ride up it back to our starting point.
I didn't know it, but we were now already on the Rio Hondo. I was expecting the fork after the second dam, but it comes right after the first dam. So, this meant that we were riding on the Rio Hondo, but I thought that we were on the San Gabriel. This became even more confusing when we made another wrong turn and ended up back at the San Gabriel, now going north (the wrong way). We couldn't figure out what this seeming third huge river was, east of what we thought was the San Gabriel. It was all very mysterious, but we were running out of time, so we headed south again and hit the Whittier Narrows Dam, as expected. What I didn't know was that the Whittier Narrows Dam is so huge (4.5 miles long) that it actually dams up both rivers, in a place where they conveniently are rather close to each other.
By now it was 2:30 or so, and we were clearly not going to make it. We weren't even within 10 miles of the ocean. Tam Pham was starting to get a little tired, and this was bad, since I had already been lagging behind, waiting for him. But, since we were on the San Gabriel, there was a fun milestone to shoot for - the start of the ride that my son Sean and I had taken the week before. If we could make it to that point, then I would have ridden the entire San Gabriel river (so I thought) at different points in my life, and I would at least know the trail for the next time I tried to conquer the loop.
We made it, arriving at Wilderness Park (at the junction of I-5 and the 605) at 3:00pm. We had taken maybe 3 1/2 hours to go 33 miles, and we had 2 hours of sunlight left for us to make it back to the car before it got dark. This seemed at least doable, an average speed of 15 miles per hour, and was certainly desirable - I only had my prescription sunglasses with me, and you don't want to have to ride in the dark with those.
Now Tam Pham had seriously started running out of gas at this point, and so he started sneaking tows as we rode. He would come up from behind me and grab on to my saddle, and I wouldn't feel it until I tried to speed up. I actually ended up towing him for maybe 7 of the miles going back up north. In fact, we went faster when he was being towed, because I knew that I wouldn't leave him behind.
So, we were averaging 16 mph or so, and everything was looking good, when - trouble - my rear tire went over some glass on the path, and we had to break out the patch kit and fix it, since I was out of spare tubes. This job was made even more fun by the new pump which I had purchased along with the bike, but had never had to use before. It had given us trouble on the first tube, and it was giving us trouble on this one, and I vaguely remembered the guy at the bike store saying that it really worked better if you did something to it before you tried to use it. I can't wait to find out what it is when the bike store opens on Tuesday, because I still can't remember for sure. While we were stopped, I also fixed the bad tube that I had taken out of the front tire, because now it looked like we weren't going to get back before dark, and you don't want to have to patch tires in the dark.
We were off again, and made good, uneventful time back to the surface streets, just as it was really getting convincingly dark. This wasn't a total disaster, because I had two decent headlights on my bike, with a fully charged battery, and they were good for an hour and a half of good light, followed by a half-hour of dim light. We only had 4 miles (maybe 18 minutes) of surface streets to navigate before we would be back on bike trails for the final 8 miles.
Tam Pham was famished, because he had forgotten his bagel in the car, and had only brought the good flavors of granola bars (2 bars) from the variety pack of 10 bars that he had purchased. We had only been hurrying in an attempt to avoid the darkness, and since it was dark now, we decided to stop at an indoor sit-down restaurant for some fish, rather than just grabbing some fast food. It would take a little longer, but it would probably be worth it (unless a record cold snap came through, as it did that evening, with a low of 37 degrees).
The restaurant was everything that we had hoped, and Tam was ready to hit the road running. However, my front tire was flat again. Hoping that this was just another slow leak, we pumped it up with the devil-pump and took off again. We got to the end of the surface streets without incident, climbed up the face of the final dam, and started along the top of it when my front tire went flat again. That wasn't too bad; it had lasted 3 miles since the last refill, and we were only 8 miles away from the car - no problem. As Tam Pham wrestled with the Pump From Hell, trying desperately to get it to work reliably, we watched in horror as it ripped the entire stem off of the inner tube. Well, that was one tube that wasn't going to be patched, anyway. It was about at this time that we decided that the theme for the day's ride was, The Adventure that Keeps On Giving.
Remember the tube from my front tire of that morning, the one that had had a slow leak, and then I had patched while it was still light? It was our only hope now, so we put it in by the light of my headlights, pumped it up, and hoped for the best. I made it to the bottom of the dam, about a mile, and just as I was saying to Tam, I think it's going flat again, I hit a bump, and it went instantly and totally flat. We were still at least 6 miles from the car, so we took the tire off again, and found that the bump had caused a typical set of low-pressure snake bite punctures in the tube.
Tam continued feeling the tube, looking for more leaks, and suddenly he said, Darn, there's a sliver of metal inside the tube! It must have caused the first puncture, and now it's broken off in the tube. Who knows how many punctures there are? But, we were still about 1 1/2 hours walk from the car, as compared to a 1/2 hour ride, so Tam pushed the sliver through the tube to the outside (causing another puncture, of course), and then some serious patching began. 20 minutes or so later, with one patch left in the patch kit, we again put in the tube and pumped it up.
The patches held, more or less, lasting for 1 1/2 miles or so before we had to stop and pump it up again. We put Tam Pham, as the thin guy, on my bike, and limped along like that until the tire finally gave up the ghost about 1 1/2 miles from the car, a 30-minute walk.
So, we set out walking, and the thing that was bothering us was that as we walked up this bike path in the middle of the ravine, we kept noticing things, big things, like quarries and smelting works, that we thought we should have noticed on the ride down, but hadn't. Also, the path didn't seem to be converging on the line of lights that represented civilization as fast as we were expecting.
I asked Tam Pham if he wanted to take his bike on up ahead and make sure that we were on the right trail, and see how much further ahead it was, but he declined - too pooped. I said, Well, I'd be happy to do it, you know, so I took his bike, and rode along, in the moonlight, wearing my prescription sunglasses. I didn't take my lights, because they were by this time (after all the night-time repair work) pretty much completely spent.
This is not quite as bad as it sounds, I reasoned, if such a word can be used in this case, because the moon is nice and bright, and I only have to ride down the center of the white cement bike path. No problem. In fact, after several hundred pedal strokes, I was almost sure that I could see the ranger station where we had left the car. Yes, there's the car itself! Awesome, I'll just go to the car, and honk the horn so that Tam Pham can hear it, and I can get my regular glasses and then either ride back to him or lock the bike on the rack and jog back. Good plan, too, with the exception of the WAIST-HIGH METAL BARRIER FULLY BLOCKING THE BIKE PATH that rose up (invisibly, until the last second), to swat me like a bug. Here's how hard I hit it: the seatpost was sheared off by the blow.
Now, some people have reported being in accidents where everything seemed to happen in slow motion, but I say that when you hit an immovable barrier that you only perceived a fraction of a second before you hit it, this just doesn't happen. What happens is that you are going along happily, there is a brief moment of terror, and then the accident is over - now you're just waiting for the returns to come in.
I wasn't thrown over the barrier, but I was laying in a kind of a heap on the ground. I got up and did a quick assessment: general pain all over, with an important pain nexus hovering somewhere around the groin area. I gathered up the bike (which, apart from the seatpost, was in amazingly good condition: mountain bikes are designed to take it and keep rolling) and I limped on the last 100 feet of the bike path to the street and my car.
There was a short period of confused dismay as I put the bike on the rack and discovered the missing seat, and then I really started feeling the cold. I'm pretty sure that I was starting to get a little shocky at this point, which is the body's way of trying to prevent death from blood loss after a good-sized injury. It works all right, but it's no good to be cold at the same time - with not as much blood flowing around, you really feel the cold, and my cycling gloves didn't have fingertips. I found a clean full glove that someone had lost lying on the road right next to my car (thanks!), and put it on one of my rapidly swelling and numbing hands, and went back to find Tam Pham.
Tam was relieved to see me, and I'm pleased to say that he couldn't see the barrier, even though we were now walking, and even though I had told him about it, until we were about 15 feet from it, and even then he couldn't tell for a while that it went completely across the path. We decided that it was perhaps as well that things had happened the way that they had, because if we had come upon that barrier while riding together in the dark, even with headlights, the carnage might have been spectacular.
That's about the end of the story, except that I almost passed out when we stopped for gas and I walked the 15 feet from the car to the mini mart. In the end, I had a nasty-looking cut on my shin that cleaned up nicely, a sizable amount of bruising in the groin area, and a truly amazing sensitivity to cold that lasted for the rest of the evening. I took Tam Pham home, and we had a cup of coffee, reflected upon life, and then went our separate ways.
I'd like to point out that Tam ended up riding his bike over 50 miles that day, which to me is an astounding feat for someone who hasn't ridden a bike in four years. He is Tam Pham! Also, my bike wants to say that it now has two new tubes, and also cool new tire liners of hard supple plastic between the tubes and the tires, which should go a long way towards preventing future flats. Maybe I'll try again over Thanksgiving. Yeah, it ought to be doable. New pump, early start, plenty of spare tubes, regular glasses...I'm looking forward to it already!
-Tom Chappell (11/30/94)
"What a great story! I'm glad you suffered so that I could be so entertained. What happened to you is pretty much everything I've ever feared could go wrong on a long ride (but never has for me), aside from having to stop for fish, and my ultimate fear: having to patch a flat tire in the dark during a cold rainstorm with no light. My enjoyment was somewhat diminished by the thought of you driving about 185 miles in one day to pull off this ride. Ideally, the bicycle is used INSTEAD OF the car, and not as a means of leveraging the number of miles that you are able to drive. My additional bicycling advice:
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Last Updated: 04/25/04