• Thursday-What'sUP June 23 - 06:07 pm

The 2011 Portage Health Keweenaw Chain Drive Festival took place this past Saturday, with 270 racers, biking the 16 and 32 mile distance races throughout Houghton and Hancock, along with 48 kids competing in the Junior Chain Drive. The race is held each year on Father's Day weekend and promotes the sport of mountain biking and healthy fun for the family. All funds raised through this event, are put back into improving and preserving trails throughout Houghton and Keweenaw Counties.

Melanie Hakala Rossi was right there on the Lift Bridge, ready to capture the racers as they came across the span, headed around the bend and under the Bridge, for that portion of the race. As mentioned above, there are events for adults and for the younger folks, too, but I'm puzzled by Melanie's last photo, wondering which race these two were competing in. Perhaps they entered both? ;->

Well that certainly is a different take on the "bicycle built for two", now isn't it??

WOW...great pics Mel...nice one of Em too!

Loved that last photo!! I've seen bikes like that out here. Nice way to take the child out for a bike ride without having to do all the work yourself.

Great photos!!

Looks like fitness-fun. I just hope for the kid's sake that the gentleman in the last photo did not have burritos for lunch :)

Looks like a good time! I'm into belt driven bikes. :)

Great pictures again today.Does the course for this race start from Houghton, go thru Hubbell, up to Calumet and back on U.S.41 to Hancock. It was back in 1947 when Bob Koepel and I built a bicycle built for 2, i.e. remove front wheel from second bike and attach it to rear wheel of first bike,that we would ride from Hubbell to Rambyltown Free Museum etc. We drove to Ripley in 1947 to see the maiden voyage of the SS WILFRED SYKES as she glided thru the Portage Lake and under the old swing bridge on her way to Duluth.

I "flagged" at the corner of Jasberg and Birch in Hancock and then helped at the field kitchen at the end of the race. There were over 300 racers. They had free bananas, oranges, watermelon, Gaterade and water as well as sloppy joes (meat and veggie by K.Steiner and C. Ransom), chips, and home made cookies (from the Keweenaw Trekkers). Non-bikers paid. As the bikers came through the food line I talked to people from Pelican,Madison and Hayward, WI, Ann Arbor, Munising, Rhinelander, the Marquette-Ishpeming-Negaunee area, Duluth, Minneaspolis-St.Paul and more. The winners, bronze,silver,gold stand on a tri-level walk-up platform for awards. Families accompany their racers, so there is a lot of "tourist" type investment in the area as a result of this race. For aesthetics, you can see how colorful the race is, but you can't hear the amazing sound of 600-plus tires whirring down the pavement! Viewers also should know that there are first-aid stations all along the racing route. The Chain Drive is a well-organized machine!

PS. It's a mountain bike race. The racers go under the bridge to West Hancock along the waterfront, up to Jasberg and out M-203 to the Churning Rapids-Maasto Hiihto areas. There are lots of gulleys which means much down and up hill.

My husband loved bike-riding....he had 3! In the second photo, what a disaster a broken chain or 'spill' would have caused. Talk about a domino effect and/or "chain reaction".

You always want to be the rear person on a bicycle built for two, so that you can just let your feet go around on the pedals, while the person up front is pumping like crazy!

Ah, but being the rear person could have it's own issues, depending on what the front rider had for lunch...