Barney Ward, of Old Fat Man Adventures, recently joined the Surly family of cyclists when he bought a 50cm Long Haul Trucker, or LHT, in the Hill Street Blue color. And like almost all LHT owners, he immediately set about customizing his new sturdy steed.

As he was installing a rack and swapping the saddle, tires, handlebars, and shifters, Barney pondered what to call his style of bicycling. The result of his cogitation is a term which I think applies to a great many of us—Sight Seeing Bicycling. Here’s what he has to say about it:

For some time now it has puzzled me to put a name on the type of bike riding my style should be called. This afternoon a good name for it popped into my mind. It shall be called sight seeing bicycling. Gentle rolling around with a camera to see, photograph and report on whatever plops down in front of me.

Some of us ride bikes to get and stay fit. Some of us ride primarily for transportation. A few cyclists are racers. Many of us ride for all kinds of purposes. And when we ride to see the sights and enjoy the countryside, it seems to me that “sightseeing” is an excellent way to describe what we’re doing. I wish I’d thought of it!

 
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The sun’s low, the air is crisp, but the road is clear and cycling’s good. Shadows bear as much resemblance to reality as the reflections in a house of mirrors, but that’s part of the fun!

 
We love our bikes and everything that goes with them, right? And we never tire of looking at them. At least I don’t, and if I’m to judge from what others tell me, I’m not alone. So each Sunday I’ll publish a bike related picture. Most of the time the picture will be a photo, but I’ll also include drawings, paintings, sculptures, and any other representation of a bike or bike stuff. If you have one you’d like to contribute to the gallery, just email your picture(s) to me.

 
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All of us who have been enduring winter’s cold, snow, or freezing rain are looking for any hint that this is all coming to an end. Here in the northern Adirondack foothills, there’s a hint that spring will someday arrive. The air smells different at dawn, with a tang of new life, perhaps carried north from more temperate regions. Birds are more vocal as they assemble in flocks after roosting through night in sheltered areas. They know the season will change soon. Chickadees are singing the fee-bee song, woodpeckers are tapping out their breeding territories, and the squirrels are frisking in the trees. On the other end of the Adirondack Mountains, though, spring is even closer. Photographer Tony Jancek has been getting out as often as he can to take photos of this much anticipated shift in seasons. Here are some of his pictures.

Ice clings to rocky walls, perhaps attracting climbers equipped with crampons and ice axes, but these frozen waterfalls are on borrowed time as the days lengthen and temperatures rise:

 
Fog may hang tough over the hills, but that doesn’t deter this feisty red squirrel from keeping track of what’s happening on his patch:

 
Spotty snow remains in shady areas and in the woods of the southeastern Adirondack foothills, but the fields are bare of this burden, and attract hungry whitetail deer. Here a family dine on last year’s growth of alfalfa:

 
A mallard hen with three nattily dressed suiters patrol an ice-free pond. If she hasn’t already done so, she will soon mate with one of the drakes and will raise a brood of ducklings in a nest built on the ground in one of the surrounding fields:

 
Not all the ponds are free of ice, including this one:

 
Look carefully, and you’ll see that there’s a whole lot of activity going on. At least four beavers—a family of two parents and at least two young live in the dome-shaped lodge—are enjoying a delicious meal of bark and aquatic roots. Here are three of them, two in the foreground, and one beyond the lodge:

 
And here are two more:

 
Look closely and you can see the fingers of the near beaver’s hands as he grasps a limb so he can chew the bark off the branch which the beavers set aside in autumn. Beavers build caches of branches in the bottom of ponds so that they can eat through the winter when ice sheaths the water from shore to shore. (Read more about beavers in “The Living Legacy of the North American Beaver” and “Voices from the Wild: Busy as a Beaver.”)

Watching a family of beavers enjoying a meal in broad daylight is a delight, and to add to the thrill, a bald eagle banks overhead as scans the pond with his sharp eyes, searching for his own meal, one of fish:

 
Now that’s a sighting to raise one’s spirit as we wait for spring to take hold for good.

 
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