Berkshire Cycling Classic Cyclosportif: 100K Route

64 miles          Challenging         Paved Roads

Start: Lenox
Towns: Lenox, Stockbridge, Lee, Tyringham, Monterey, New Marlboro, Sheffield, Egremont, Alford, West Stockbridge






View to south from behind Tanglewood

Wind intimidates me. I don't like even to listen to it from snug inside my house. Don't like it when I'm hiking outside, or gardening, or cycling. Duly noted. Today I didn't actively dislike it, tried to note it and then let it go, but struggled with it almost the entire route of the 100K Berkshire Cyclosportif, coming up on May 6. The weather reporters tell me it was a fairly steady 20mph; I only know that I was working pretty hard to hold a cadence of 70 and it was energy-sapping.





South County landscape

The route itself is fabulous, very beautiful virtually all the time. It rolls from Lenox south, winding around the smaller towns of southern Berkshire County, passing through varied geography and offering the rider a fair sampling of the rural southern Berkshires. This is pretty terrain, frequently fairly manicured, in a prosperous New England kind of way. Further north, and in the hilltowns, there are wilder, less developed parts of the county, but this is the best known area.

Lenox, the start of the route, is home to Tanglewood, summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which plays a big role in driving our tourist-based economy. Though it is  the most prominent of many cultural institutions in the area, there are many more,  mostly seasonal, and the economy and population are radically different summer to winter. Right now towns and roads are still quiet, and will be until June.

View of Stockbridge Bowl from near end of ride

After passing through Stockbridge, where there are plenty of stops for food or water, the route follows the beautiful Tyringham Valley before turning south and climbing over the hill to Monterey. There is a busy section of road on Rt. 23, but it isn't long, and I quickly turned south on Corashire Road, a beautiful short link to Route 57. From there it travels west to Sheffield, before turning back north on Route 41. It is generally flat and rural most of the way, with the only two real climbs: the first  between Tyringham and Monterey, and the second at the very end, from West Stockbridge into Lenox. That one goes past two Berkshire Natural Resources Council properties. You'll see if you click the route map below.

Old barn

In the end I finished with plenty of time to spare, and a new, more specific, goal for the May 6 event. Oh yes, when I learned about the 7-hour time limit to successfully complete the course, I changed my registration from the 138K to the 100K. There is no possibility that I will ride the 138K within that time limit. The 100K, about 64 miles, about 3700 feet climbing is doable for me. Perhaps more gracefully if there's less wind on the day of the event.

Shadbush is blooming, spring is here

Sportif or not, this route is another good addition to my list of County rides, one that I will be glad to ride again. To see a map of the route and cuesheet, click here to visit Ride with GPS.



Back to Berkshire County Rides list

Berkshire Cycling: Stockbridge Loop 1

27 miles     Paved Roads
Start: Berkshire Botanical Gardens, Route 102, Stockbridge
Towns: Stockbridge, Housatonic, Great Barrington, Alford, West Stockbridge 



It's now about two weeks later than the date of my last outdoor ride in 2010, and that was later than in 2008 or 2009. Before that, who knows? This despite the scare thrown into New England cyclists by the Halloween weekend storm. Today is sunny, 50+ degrees, little wind; what more could a rider want towards the end of November? There was a skim of ice on the swamp when I left, but it warmed up quickly.



And there was other news, as good as the weather today. What does this tell you: shopping center parking lots full to overflowing, with merchants providing school buses to ferry people from distant overflow parking. Town centers crowded, with people on the sidewalks and no parking places available. Yes, it must be the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., so called black Friday. Everybody was shopping ... so, happy side effect, no one was on our rural roads ... they were emptier than I have ever seen them from a bicycle seat. I will scoff no more at my culture's love of shopping. Instead, I'll jump on the bike and be glad for open roadways.

I parked at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. This is a fabulous garden, gardens really, in Stockbridge. If you're in that town during the short Berkshire growing season, don't miss it.


Riding south on Rt. 183, I passed both the Norman Rockwell Museum and Chesterwood, a National Trust Historic Site that was home and studio to sculptor Daniel Chester French, probably best known his work on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. It is more than a museum to his work, also hosting resident sculptors and an annual juried show of contemporary sculpture.


The road follows the Housatonic River, and passes through the eponymously named town, where many of the old factories are put to use as galleries, studios, and one very good bakery, Berkshire Mountain Bakery. Worth a stop for bread, including some with chocolate, but unhappily, no coffee.



Turning south on Rt. 7, my ride went through Great Barrington, then turned west on Taconic Street. The traffic in Great Barrington was bearable, because everyone was inside shopping, their cars still on the roadside.


This year's crop of winter berries is abundant,  their bright red colors appearing in wet areas. I followed Taconic Street through Alford, using West Road to West Center, which ends back on Rt. 102, where I turned right into West Stockbridge, then continued on back to Stockbridge


Besides its historic downtown, Alford still has several working dairy farms, a happy fact in a town where development pressure must be intense, given its location in the southern Berkshires (read that: accessible to NYC, Tanglewood and Great Barrington.)


All in all, this made a very nice ride, thought not exactly what I set out to do, it was fun and I saw quite a few other cyclists on the road today.


 Finally, a retraction. I've been wondering if there are any careful readers out there who noticed my writing a month or so ago of my plan to keep fit  by going to the gym on the way home from work, and thought: huh, what's that, her?  Is this the person we know? Well, there was at least one: my brother! So truth be told, no. I came to my senses, lost the illusion, and realized (happily before spending $300 that I will do much more fun things with) that there isn't a bat's chance in hell that I will stop, after work, tired, in the cold dark winter night, to work out in a gym. I don't like gyms. I like the outdoors, cycling, cross-country skiing. So this year, once I can't ride, it's back to the stationary set up. Though I'm thinking of purchasing studded snow tires for the bike, they certainly help the car get around in winter .... hmmmm. Black ice, anyone?

Roads: Rt. 183 south to Rt. 7. South to Taconic Street. West to West Road / West Center to Rt. 102. East to West Stockbridge, then Stockbridge. Click here to see the route, with map, cue sheet and climb  details, on Map My Ride.

Berkshire Cycling: The Landscape of Home, 3

Land Use

This weekend brought three sunny days in a row, and it is a good start to November when I get on the bike every day. Though most of last weekend's snow has melted, when the sides of the road are white, it's chilly on a bike. There's a skim of ice on the swamp, which doesn't melt off until the  afternoon sun has some time to do its work.


It is always warmer in the valleys, so Friday I drove to Pittsfield, parked in the giant and oh-so-American parking lot at the giant grocery store on Rt. 7 (where everything anyone actually needs is located in the perimeter aisle or two) and rode across Dan Fox Drive, then south on Swamp Road to West Stockbridge. I was hoping for lunch at Cafe Pomo d'Oro, but it was past tourist season, and Scott is only open on Saturday and Sunday.


Sunday, looking for somewhat warmer temperatures, I drove to the Connecticut River Valley with temperatures rising into the 50s. Parking on Damon Rd., I used the rail trail to cross the river, rode up Rt. 47 to Sunderland, crossed back west over the river on Rt. 116, and returned south on River Road. It makes a nice, very flat 26 miles, with not much bothersome traffic, although the road is busy, and cluttered with shopping malls on the west side at Northampton.

This is traditionally farmland. Sadly, most has been lost to housing. There remain some small vegetable farms, and tobacco, a profitable crop. You still see drying barns on the landscape. I know next to nothing about its history: one of the remaining large farms had a sign reading: established 1953. I wondered if 58 years makes an old farm here.

This time, more than my other trips, it has been a hard re-entry, from riding in southern France to riding at home again, and I'm not yet sure precisely why. Maybe a part of it is returning at the approach of winter, the time of year to put the bike away for months. But for whatever reason, I am constantly conscious of the cultural differences. The similarities and differences between the two countries fascinate me.

The landscape is beautiful here, also. Differently, though there seems so little open space between towns, we fill most every spot along the road with houses. And the more houses we have, the bigger we make the roads, and the more traffic they accommodate, the further away from jobs and towns go the houses, and  the more houses (and so commuters) there are, the bigger we make the roads. One man I met in France, talking about suburban sprawl around Toulouse, said that France of course keeps space for farmland, it needs the food. He said, compared to the U.S, it is a small country, so there must be space for farms. Now, you need to know that  Toulouse is a beautiful, cosmopolitan city, with major industry, the fourth largest city in France, and I was, by the efficient, affordable, train system, less than  hour away ... still,  commuting is just arriving there. Try to imagine that: outside the 4th biggest city in the US,  an hour away by train, there is virtually no commuting, a distinct local culture, and a small city surrounded by productive farmland. It is almost unimaginable, in a place where there is barely a rural gap between Boston and Richmond.




Riding along, it is impossible not to notice that along these roads our culture  leaves far more litter, thrown from car windows. I have no idea why we do this, or what we are thinking, when we do it ... probably we are not thinking. The roads here are also beautiful, though there always seems to be more traffic. The two things may be related. We are always driving somewhere, and always eating and drinking: coffee, chips, donuts, a soda in hand as we go ... and then thrown out the window into the landscape. Not to mention, based on the litter, how much boozing goes on in cars. It escapes me, but is perhaps because generally, culturally, we don't walk or cycle our roads, and experience them only as  passageways that we speed insularly through. In any case there is a constant stream of litter roadside here.


Three days off work, all sunny, three rides. A fine weekend and an excellent beginning to November.