A safe place to ride in the Phoenix, Arizona area


Phoenix is wonderful place to ride. Right now, in October as I write this, the weather is just glorious. And if you're tempted to get out there and pedal under those beautiful Arizona skies I encourage you. But I recommend that you find a safe place, and today I'd like to talk about my favorite one, Skunk Creek and the Arizona Diversion Channel.

If you've always spent most of your time traveling around the Phoenix area in a car, you may be saying "huh?" and really that's the point. This is a completely different space from the car world, for good reason. Cars and bicycles don't mix. In fact, it's a deadly mix, so avoid the temptation of riding around the streets, even the quiet neighborhood streets, of the Phoenix area. You're small and vulnerable on a bike, and cars are big and clumsy.

Now calm down there if you think that I'm blaming drivers, or the road designers of Phoenix, I'm not. The roads are wonderful for cars, safe, flat and wide. I've always appreciated excellent engineering, and the roads of Phoenix, including the freeways, are wonderful. But they're no place for bicycles!

Of course if you're one of those suicidal people who insists on bicycling around cars, I won't argue with you. My idea of a pleasant ride in the sunshine doesn't include risking my life because someone in a car looks down at their cell phone, or sneezes. When I do have to ride along a major street I use the sidewalk, and in neighborhood streets I just go slowly, watching carefully. But when I get to the Skunk Creek Trailhead I can relax. It's wonderful.


The trailhead in on 83rd Avenue between Thunderbird Road and Bell, and the smartest and safest thing is to drive there, unload your bike, and go for a ride. There's wonderful pavement for your wheels, and unlike the paths along the canal, the edge is protected with a fence. And here's the best part: you never, ever, have to cross a street - the paths go under the streets.

Put on some sunscreen, take along a bottle of water, and discover a whole new world. I'll see you there, and remember to yield to horses!



If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more