OK, I have a great 27 mile ride today on my local bike trail (the one that goes around Paul Douglas Forest Preserve) and I just had to post an entry about something that all of us who ride bike trails encounter but is not really mentioned often. Yes, as the title of this post says “Bike Trail Crap” …and I mean it literally in this case.

In the words of the famous Forrest Gump: “It Happens” (or maybe that is the censored TV version. Well, I am trying to keep my blog G rated, so the various blog cops don’t ban me or come after me, so I will keep it that way too).

 I’ve noticed a lot of crap on the Paul Douglas FP trail and a few things just occurred to me. Originally, I though that most of it was dog crap but I have discovered that, on this trail, a lot of it is deer crap.

I am not going to go into a big rant about people picking up after their dogs. It is, of course the right thing to do and some dog owners are very conscientious while others are not. Personally, on a trail, if dog owners would at least pick up a stick and push the crap off of the trail, I think that would be fine.

Anyway, since I discovered that much of this is deer crap (the PDFP is a large area and has many deer), I have found that you will find the most deer in the areas where most of the deer crap is (duh!). BTW: I usually see a few deer on my rides on this path. So since deer are out there and they are going to crap on the trail, I guess there isn’t much that can be done about that.

Another thing that you will encounter on bike trails that also allow horses, is of course, horse crap. Horse back riders very rarely carry around plastic bags (or shovels) to clean up after their “pets” 🙂 and these piles are pretty unmistakable when you run across them. If you are riding on trails that also allow horses than these you are just going to have to watch out for these little obstacles.

And the last variation of crap that I come across quite often is goose and bird crap. If  you ride on trails by lakes or rivers where there are a lot of geese and/or ducks, this can create quite an obstacle course.

Besides for the crap, geese can sometimes have quite and attitude also. I have ridden by or through packs of wild geese pretty often and have been honked and hissed at quite a bit. I haven’t actually been attacked (although I know that they will if you are close to a nest with eggs or goslings) but their attitudes and hissing can be pretty intimidating.

OK, I think that’s about all the crap that I wanted to write about for now. 🙂

Also, just to get back out of the gutter, I wanted to mention that I also saw a large beautiful hawk on my PDFP ride this afternoon. It’s always cool when you run across something like that.