another beautiful day in paradise

Doug M and I got out for a good ride on Monday. We both had clearance to be gone from before when school starts to after bedtime. Had to make full advantage of that.

After 45 minutes of bushwhacking from the get go, we were able to hook up with some old forest roads that seem to see very little use. It was a good warm up to the day.
We hooked up with the Peaks Trail first. It was good.

we did.

looks like it'll be a loooong day. Our destination wasn't even mentioned.

I saw this blaze quite a bit whilst on the Colorado Trail. Anyone know what the "i" is?
It wasn't long before we started climbing in earnest.
The scenery was good.

Then came the snow. We had to get over the top of that. At this point, we said, "Well, we'll go to the top to see what it looks like. If it's crappy and snowy, we can call it a day and ride back from whence we came. At least it'll make a good descent."

A little closer now. Snow. Hiking.
A look back at Doug negotiating our first snow field. It's not mountain biking unless you're hiking.

Ah, the top! Well sort of. At least there wasn't any quantifiable amount of snow immediately ahead. We decided to press on. After lunch anyway. I had the secret ingredients in my bag. Sugar and burritos go a long way on a big ride. The next section was mostly climbing, but the trail was thoroughly enjoyable. We didn't have to hike until the very top (ish).


Onwards and more climbing util we were really at the "top." The real top. This is the view to the West. We couldn't have asked for clearer skies or a more beautiful day.

The view from the same spot. This time looking West. That's I70 and Copper Mountain down there.
The first big descent was a blast. 1500' goes pretty quick when it's straight down and above timberline.
We ducked into the trees for just a tad. The trail was spectacular.
Until we turned to go back up again. After 1/2 hour more of hiking/climbing, we could see the top. The saddle in the pic seems a lot farther away when you're 6 hours in on a ride and pushing a bike uphill.


Finally, the top. Wheeler Pass, 12460 feet.

Here's looking back at Wheeler Pass. See those zig zagging game trails? We had to take them. I didn't ride the switchbacks. If you screwed up, it was a long fall downhill.
The trail as it lay ahead. The snow was, on average, about 8" deep. What really made it suck was the combination of a couple of other factors. A)Dangerous side slope. B) crusty enough that we had to posthole. Bikes didn't push very well with that kind of snow. C) Cold. Not too much snow see's that bowl. Once we were in the shade, it got instantly colder. Guess that's what you get when the sun is waning and you're over 12,000' in the snow.
We finally made it across our snowy traverse to a jeep road on the other side. We came across this vehicle on the road. "Dude, if you go up the road a little bit, you can snowboad, brah." "We call it the 4th of July Bowl." Gnar dudes, right on. Don't tip over your truck on the way down. :)
We descended on rocky jeep roads to the top of the resort, and their most popular restaraount. We didn't eat - it was closed. We were plenty hungry, though. We had been out all day long.

The original plan was to hit town, then roll back to our car via singletrack. We didn't hit town until 6:30 or so, though. By our calculations, we wouldn't have enought time to ride the singletrack back and still make it out on time. We instead decided to hit the paved bike path. It wasn't the worlds most beautiful ride, but we were tired by that time. Wasted.

Good ride, though. It's not often that you embark on a ride at 10am and run out of daylight by the time the ride is over. It ended up being 9hrs and 15min. Talk about a big day. Not exactly an everyday thing, but you got to do it at least once per year. Gotta do it.