I’ve been busy lately and haven’t had time for much OSM mapping. But yesterday I went on a mt bike trip. I had planned the route so that I could check out some old quarries and a couple of possible paths as well.

The temperature was a couple of degrees above 0, but there was still ice on the small pools of water on the trail. Sometimes the ice was so thick that the bike would not simply go through but first skid on the ice and then go through. It was also very muddy and wet, so the biking conditions were quite tough. But if you go mtb-biking in Sweden in november, these conditions are pretty normal.

The first quarry had not been used for some time, but it was quite easy to find. It was used for stone material, not any metal extraction.

Shortly after visiting the first quarry, I put the bottom half of the bike inside a lake, to remove some of the mud from the gear. When I continued, the bike broke however. The bolt that hold the saddle to the seatpost broke. Of course I did not have a spare bolt with me, so I had to decide whether to call it a day or not. But since I don’t often get the time to go out biking/mapping, I decided to continue even though it meant biking standing up for more than 20 km.

I could not go as fast as before, but it worked quite ok. After a while I found the second quarry. This was a granite quarry, and had been open in the 80s. The nice thing about it was that there were still lots of large blocks of stone stored inside the quarry, as can be seen on the pictures. I climbed a couple of the to take pictures, but did not stay very long.

On my way back home I mapped 2 paths I hade planned for some time. But the last kilometers in the forest were quite hard since I was quite tired after biking standing up. Especially the technical climbs were tough since it was difficult to maintain the right torque so that the bike would get up the climb without losing grip on the wet roots and rocks.

Even though I was a bit disappointed in the bike braking down, I was quite content with the mapping, and happy that I had decided to carry on anyway….