gobble gobble

After months of sweat, toil, budgets and beaurocracy, the new Wild Turkey trail at Heil Valley Ranch finally opened up today. I've put a lot of sweat equity into Heil Ranch over the last several years and was curious how easy this Wild Turkey would be on the pallate. I had my first taste today. It wasn't quite Stranahans, but it was quite tasty. So tasty, in fact, that it's hard to believe that Wild Turkey was distilled by Boulder County Open Space.

I met a few fine folks today at the Geer Canyon trailhead and we rolled out on the trail shortly after lunch. The initial climb went by pretty quick and we arrived at the junction of old, the tip of the Ponderosa Loop. A new sign calls out the presence of Wild Turkey. Straight ahead and on your right.

The new Wild Turkey trail is 2.96 miles long. It's great to see that this new trail is longer than the existing loop. We headed right at the junction, eager to catch the new trail. I knew that centerpoint of the WT Trail was it's lowest, so I thought it would be fun to check this out in both directions. This is a good shot of John and Gina heading north thru a moderately forested section that was both fast, swoopy, but you had to stay on your toes.



Here's Don on about the same section. It was a beautiful early Fall day, too.




Nate in another angle of the same section

I quit taking photos for a bit. The new trail connects in with the existing Ponderosa loop at the cliff lookout with the bench. We went right (counter clockwise) and continued to climb the babyhead section of the old loop. After quickly descending to the main junction, we headed north on the (still going counter clockwise) on the Ponderosa Loop back out to the cliff. We then ducked right, back onto Wild Turkey to ride WT from north to south. Look familiar? Same old junction with a new sign and trail.

The northernmost sectoin of Wild Turkey is .34 miles of crusher fine. I remember this being one of the sections they made with the traildozer. They applied the crusher fine to help stabilize the soil.

The views from this corner are great. Lyons to the north and Longmont to the east. Nate negotiates the first corner and starts to descend into the rocky forest.
But there are a few sections thru the trees that are buff and fast. For now anyway. We'll see how they stand the test of time.



There's even a few turns to be had traversing thru open meadows.
Over the last few trail work days, we had noticed a few sections that were perennially wet and wondered what the county was going to do with them. I'm not worried anymore. They armored the hell out of the trail and it's solid.
The armored sections were pretty fun, too.
It's hard to tell from only looking at the pictures, but one thing that I was tremendously impressed with was the flow of the trail. The trail planners did a great job of allowing the trail to remain fun by constantly flowing back and forth along the countour of the hillside.
Even after having worked on it and hiked thru it several times, my initial overall impression of the Wild Turkey trail was much better than I expected. It had a little bit of everything, with good doses of the type of riding I like best - good flow thru rocky technical lines. Wild Turkey is a trail that will force you to pay attention. It's tight, rocky, but still relatively slow speed. It was a fantastic sampling today. It is (hopefully) a good indicator of how we can potentially shape the connector coming north into Lyons. The connector will come in at the lowest point of Wild Turkey on the easternmost part of the trail.

You need to ride this trail.

The next workday at Heil is Oct 6. We will be working on the new connector to Lyons!