Bike = love

This weekend was perhaps the final beautiful one of the year, which meant I seized the opportunity to head up high in the hills and ride singletrack. On Saturday Dan and I rode my favorite trails, which sadly, I've only been on a handful of times this summer. Miles of rocky, narrow, technical singletrack wind through Ponderosa forests with Longs Peak looming above.

We linked up the trails in a way that created a nearly continuous 1700' descent on which I felt more relaxed and in control than I ever have. I've been consciously working on letting the bike go and letting off the brakes on steep descents. Speed makes almost everything easier to ride, and in the case of the steepest, loosest, most rutted section of this descent, I've normally slowed to a timid crawl, crept down the side of the rut, lost traction, slid down, and then vaulted off the bike. Yesterday I came in with enough speed that I didn't even recognize the section until I was arcing across a high line, about to shift over and bank off the other side of the rut to set up a good line for the rocks below. What a difference speed makes!

Dan negotiating a chainring-eating obstacle

I didn't take many photos because Dan had his helmet cam going. Unfortunately, he had it aimed at the ground instead of down the trail. Oops. I guess we'll have to go back and ride it all again.

Dab!

Today I struggled to figure out what to do. My knee has been feeling good the past few days, but I didn't want to push it with a long ride, and yesterday I smashed my other knee into the handlebars. I ended up driving up into the foothills again, unloaded my bike, and realized it was time to figure out where I was going to go. I felt like exploring, and there were a few trails I wanted to try to link up, and one particular descent I've hiked and have had a hankering to ride. However, it would be a long, long hike-a-bike to get to the top the way I knew, so I struck off looking for an alternate route to the top.

5 minutes into my ride and I was already bushwhacking.

This went on for half an hour

That's the destination for another day

The pleasant-looking grass is harboring angry hidden logs

Eventually I popped out on an overgrown logging road that would link up to my descent of desire. But another faint trail caught my eye, so I followed it. It was someone's little singletrack project, marked with branches and cairns, but it clearly sees virtually no use. It dead ended in a small clearing with a nice view and a grave marker.

Here lies Linkin Park. Seriously.

There's a trail there if you squint

After being mildly annoyed that the faint trail just ended, I turned around and returned to the descent I had been waiting for. I grinned as my knobby front tire bit into the damp loam as the grade steepened. After a few seconds, the rocks began to grow, the rut deepened, and my grin spread. This trail was even more fun than I had imagined. A black squirrel soared across the trail as it leapt between branches, scolding me as soon as it had the new branch firmly in its grasp. I think the squirrel was just jealous.

A descent worthy of 30 minutes of bushwhacking

Immensely satisfied with having finally taken a bike down that trail, I lazily rode for another 90 minutes to get back to my car. The sun sank lower, and I dropped into the cool air settling in a narrow canyon.

Aspen bask in the last bit of diffuse sunlight

After a couple miles, I turned off and began climbing a trail I'd never been on. It petered out before the ridgetop I had to get over, so I pedaled my lowest gear through the crunchy yellow grass. Eventually I entered a small network of singletrack I had only been through once. I flipped on my light so I could see the trail beneath the thick forest canopy, and after a few wrong turns, I fortuitously managed to navigate back out to a dirt road.

Goodnight, mountains.

4 hours, 17 miles, 4000' of climbing, and some very scratched up legs. That was a good ride.

Fire and ice

On Saturday, Caroline and I rode up into the hills to explore the area that burned in the Fourmile Fire a month ago. The mosaic of isolated, unburned green trees on steep blackened hillsides was striking. Streaks of red fire retardant abut scorched forest in many areas. Tall fire place chimneys are all that stand above many burned houses, and scorched metal appliances and shelving units form jumbled messes within the foundation walls. Amazingly, a closer inspection of the forest floor revealed tiny patches of green where plants are already regrowing. But it's going to be a long time until this landscape recovers.

Looking east toward Boulder

Gusty winds whip up a whimsical ash tornado

Caroline climbs through a desolate landscape

Burnt yucca

Yesterday I headed up higher for an adventure that had been planned for a month ago, but the fires put that plan on hold. The plan called for an extended period above 12,000', but the forecast looked grim, and the higher we got, the more ill-fated the adventure appeared.

Umm, winter has arrived

My companion for the day, Owen

After climbing into snow and fierce winds at 10,500', we decided to call off the adventure and head to lower elevations. Owen led me through some trails I had never been on before we made the always foolish but sometimes rewarding choice to try to link up where we were to where we wanted to be via very unknown territory that may or may not have tracks on public land in between. After reaching a gate with stern warning signs back a dirt road, a local drove up and said there was no good way to get where we were trying to go. The friendly guy, sitting in his old Chevy truck, mentioned one route passing Dry Lake could get us there but that it wasn't a place for bike.

Predictably, we ended up exactly where that guy said we shouldn't go, and a network of good singletrack hidden far from any roads or trailheads appeared before us! Occasional rain showers became more frequent, but Owen and I were highly amused by our discovery. My legs were really starting to tire, and my knee pain was slowly returning, but we rode on, eventually bailing down a long-deserted mine road to the gulch below. A long climb and a few fence hops brought us to where we had hoped to be!

Yellow leaves still stubbornly clung to some of the aspen

Climbing through unexplored territory

After nearly 9 hours of riding, Owen headed back up toward Ned, and I climbed to Magnolia and slowly made my way home. The sun finally came out, warming my back as I descended on the sloppy dirt road. Spending the day exploring the best and worst riding the foothills have to offer is always enjoyable, especially when you're joined by someone else with the exact same mindset.

Sunny to Snowy

The past couple weeks have put me through huge swings in emotions, just as the days have carried me through a broad spectrum of biomes. Two weeks ago, my grandfather passed away after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. Despite having always lived half a country away from him, I'd always felt very close to him. His passing hit me hard, and spending last weekend in Pennsylvania left me feeling both physically and emotionally drained, as well as a bit lost. I had been planning on time trialing the beastly Grand Loop (360 miles of the Kokopelli, Paradox, and Tabeguache trails in western Colorado and eastern Utah), but those plans were obviously derailed.

After an early morning flight back to Boulder on Monday, I gathered up my bikepacking gear, uploaded some files onto my GPS, piled 18,000 calories of food into my bags, and headed farther west. Five hours later, I was asleep in the back of car at the Lunch Loops trailhead. My alarm screeched at 4:30 the next morning, and I soon found myself pedaling out to the Kokopelli trailhead in Loma.

Fall colors in the desert

I grinned giddily at the thought of some sort of redemption on this loop after having been destroyed by it several years ago. It was my first ultra race experience, and I'm still not sure how I managed to circumnavigate the course and make it back to the starting point. The highs were amazing, but the lows were so devastatingly bleak that I vowed to never try another ultra race, let alone return to the Grand Loop. So much for that vow.

Amazing views from the little shandies

Anyway, this time around, the Grand Loop didn't go so well. My left knee did not particularly want to do any climbing, and with 60,000' of climbing on the loop and knee pain after only 100 miles and 6000' of climbing, I decided it wasn't worth continuing and doing any severe damage to the knee. I've been there before, and it simply is not worth it. After baking all day in record-high temperatures, I filled up on water in the Colorado, climbed out of the valley to the plateau above near Top of the World, found a nice spot to collapse, and enjoyed the sunset before falling asleep for 11 hours.

A bladder full of rather foul water

Sunset view from my bivy

I awoke the next morning feeling refreshed. My legs felt fantastic, but I knew the best thing was simply to head back to Junction and not push my knee with tens of thousands of feet of climbing. I rode the highway north to the interstate, and then pounded that pavement for another 5 hours back to my car. The desert oven baked me like I haven't been baked in quite a while, and despite having great legs, I suffered. I couldn't drink enough to stay hydrated, and after nearly running out of water, found a puddle under an overpass and scooped out enough of the bitter liquid to get me the 30 miles to the first gas station.

Despite two days of unexciting riding, a heavily-loaded bike, dehydration, and amazingly sore hind quarters, that was just what I needed to come to terms what what I'd been through prior to the adventure.

After a few late nights working in the lab back in Boulder, I jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of a few more days of summery weather to sneak in a quick weekend trip north to an unexplored mountain range. I had done a road race through this range a few years ago, but I had my head down and simply saw these mountains as a painful obstacle that had to be climbed not once, but twice before the day's work was through. This was also a favorite refuge of the first cyclists to traverse something akin to the Great Divide route, the same two adventurer's whose bikes, used during an ill-fated Arctic expedition, we found on Baffin Island a year ago. So there were a few reasons I've been feeling the draw of this range.

Caroline heading out for a day in the mountains

This stream had a few trout

We hiked and ran a big loop around and across the top of the biggest ridge, staying above 12,000' for may hours. The view from the top is staggering, with glowing white summits ringed by dark green conifers, and in the distance, these forests merge with arid yellow basins.

Evening lighting descends over the white mountains below and the desolate basin beyond

While the sun may set, the day isn't yet through

After some well-earned sleep, we set out an a rolling adventure following some haphazardly created GPS tracks I had hastily created based on trail information of unknown reputability. Miraculously, we ended up riding a great loop of mostly singletrack (of highly variable quality). These trails clearly see very little use, but the potential for connecting some big, remote loops in this region is huge. I might have to go back with some more ambitious plans next summer...