Leaf peeping and pedaling

The first time I cycled up the hill to the orchards outside Bayfield, Wis., I got off my bike and walked. It was that steep.

Of course, that was before I learned that my Cannondale cross bike had a granny gear. And before I discovered other routes that didn't involve such a daunting slope.

But even that first time, once I gasped my way to the crest of the hill, I knew I had found something special: some of the best rural cycling in the Upper Midwest.

And in the fall? Breathtaking.

Last September, when the aspens and maples were in their full glory, I delved into the beauty. Tom Hart, owner of the cycle shop Bayfield Bike Route, sent me and my husband up to a network of rough trails on wooded land owned by the Mount Ashwabay Outdoor Education Foundation for a day of mountain biking.

"This time of year, it's like being dipped in a bag of yellow butterscotch candy," he said.

Years ago we started riding our bikes on Madeline Island, a short ferry ride from Bayfield. The roads there are smooth and flat, and they take you through the woods to views of ice blue water and Basswood and Michigan Islands, two in the Apostle Island archipelago.

The Madeline Island ferry provides a perfect view of the Chequamegon Peninsula, which thrusts into Lake Su- perior from the northwestern edge of Wisconsin. Near the peninsula's tip, the town of Bayfield stretches like a string of pearls along the red sandstone rim of the lake. The hills above the town display the seasons like a slide show: The pale green of spring darkens into summer, then explodes into color as the maples, aspen and oak flaunt their distinctive fall hues.

But biking there is not for the faint of thigh, especially if you want to get off Hwy. 13, the main road that takes you around the horn. It's fairly flat and there's a good shoulder on much of it, but it's a busy two-lane road.

A fortuitous bike stop

On our first forays, we ambled up and down the county lanes that meander from orchard to orchard, never getting too far from Bayfield. The reward in those rides was the long, exhilarating swoop back down to town, straight onto the waiting ferry that took us home to Madeline.

Then one day my bike needed some work, and we wound up at the Bayfield Bike Route, next to the lumberyard on the south side of town. There, we found a lot more than a quick fix for the wheel.

But the best part is Hart himself. After a lifetime of biking, he has the same lean, tensile strength of the custom steel bicycle frames he makes during the long winter months in northern Wisconsin.

From April to October, he likes to say, his daily biking commute to work is the most beautiful 10-mile stretch of road in the country, a section of the Star Route Road that winds through forests and past hayfields to the lakeside village of Cornucopia on the far side of the Chequamegon Peninsula.

He has that special gift of the schoolteacher he used to be: His passion for a subject is infectious.

On biking, he's an encyclopedia of information about the area, everything from details on routes to local history and even ecology. He was the one who pointed us to the Mount Ashwabay trails.

Hart gave us a map of that area and told us to look for the sugarbush trail. It would take us through virgin stands of maples and Eastern Hemlock, about 40 acres of untouched sugarbush once owned by the Nourse family, to a historic log cabin deep in the forest that is still used today to make maple syrup.

He assured us that the trails were manageable for "old people" like ourselves. "No technical single-track," he said. He was right. We headed along a wide grassy trail, acorns skittering beneath our tires, a sunlit canopy of gold and orange above our heads.

We crossed an old logging road and found ourselves in a hushed and darker place, the old forest. The trail led between giant trunks to the sugar shack tucked into a low spot. In springtime, when the snow is still thick and the sap is running, the place would be a hive -- the stack of firewood and the tractor told us that. But now, in early October, it was still and waiting. The ancient silence fell down around our ears like velvet.

Forest saturated with color

A few weeks later we loaded our road bikes on the rack on the back of our car, and, following Hart's advice, headed up to Fire Road 236. This is one of those rides that you'll hear about only from people who know it. The intersection of 236 and County Road C would just be a blur in a car, no reason to stop unless you knew that tucked into the woods was a sandy parking area.

Fire Road 236 heads 20 miles south to Ino, one in a string of little towns on Hwy. 2, the main route between Duluth and Ashland.

We were at the plateau above a lake called the Moquah Barrens, all wild country full of oaks and pines, deep rust reds and dark greens against golden fields of grass.

Not a car in sight. The road swooped and rose, then swooped again, the new asphalt as smooth as a glass beneath our tires. We kept using words like dreamy and fabulous, a bicyclist's paradise road.

The sunlight lay long and low, concentrating the colors around me until my brain was saturated. As we flew down, down, down the hill to the car and dinner in Bayfield, I soaked up as much as I could -- enough to last me, I hoped, through the long, dark days of winter.