BFR4 Recap

It's a good thing the shop is closed on Mondays. I took my daughter to school this morning and crawled back into bed! I'm whooped from yesterday's Big Fall Ride 4. In it's 4th year, the course just keeps getting better.

We shuttled riders up (about 14 in all) to the Peak to Peak highway and were pedaling by 9am, right on schedule. We rode Bunce School Road for 45 minutes or so until arriving at the Peaceful Valley Campground where we'd catch the north end of Sourdough. Bunce was smooth and fast, as the USFS had recently graded the entire thing.

Fall colors on Bunce were fantastic. In fact, fall color the whole day was fantastic.

The pace was good, spirits were good and the day was absolutely beautiful. Temps were in the 60s and 70s and there was not a cloud to be found in the sky. That's what I'm talking about when I think of Fall riding in Colorado! Sourdough was easily the toughest climb of the day.



Despite the moisture we'd had all week, SD was it's typical loose and sandy self. You could not even tell it rained up here.

A quick snack and photo break at the pond that's not a pond right now...
and we were off to South St Vrain. SSV has got to be one of the greatest trails around. It's got smooth and fast, steep and tech, rocks, drops, everything. There was only 1 casualty on SSV, but not enough to deter the rider from forging ahead.





After SSV and a handful of miles on dirt county road,

we found ourselves at Gold Lake perched high on a rock with a 360 panoramic view for lunch.

Lunch was good.

Jeep roads from Gold Lake connected us down to Jamestown where a few folk stopped at the Merc for a snack and some water.

A little bit of pavement later and we were in Left Hand OHV. LHOHV gets a bad rap (mostly deserved) from motos and shooters, but if you get far enough in, it feels as remote as anywhere else.



The plan was to climb up 286 and come down Carnage Canyon. Carnage has historically been where all of the big time rock crawlers go, but it was closed to motorized about a year ago for streambed protection. We climbed up Carnage about 2 months ago and it was all good still. Not the case now. Carnage was a total bust. Apparently, they didn't just close it. Within the last month, volunteers had come in to completely rehab the old road into the streambed it used to be. I was bummed to see the last remnants of the road gone, but the new streambed looks great. Anyway, we ended up hiking down most of it because it's not ridable. RIP Carnage Canyon, we'll miss you. From Left Hand OHV, we were back on the highway and heading to Heil Ranch.


That last 1.25 miles on dirt road to get to Heil sure seem long at the end of a long day.


Heil was tougher than usual. After riding 40+ miles, that first climb on Wapiti sure offers up new persepective. I like the reroute, though. We hammered up Wapiti and down Picture Rock. There was beer and brats waiting at the shop.

Thanks all for coming out. We had a strong crew, ZERO bailouts and we covered some serious ground. Got a few new ideas for next year, too ;)

BFR4 reminder!

Don't forget, Big Fall Ride 4 is coming up this sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! 8am at the bike shop and it looks as if the weather gods will smile upon us. We'll be hitting some of the finest riding at some of the finest riding areas in Boulder County. Last year played out like a greatest hits album of Boulder County riding and this year will be better. I've even got a late-in-the-ride surprise if you're up for it :)

See you Sunday!

Big Fall Ride Four!

Save the date - Sunday September 27. This will be our 4th ever Big Fall Ride, BFR4. We'll meet up at the bike shop at 8am (yes, 8am) for the ride.

This is a BIG ASS RIDE. Seriously, it will be hard. Mileage will be 40-50, over 4,000' of climbing and around 7500' of descending. Your wheels will spin on jeep road, singletrack, dirt county road, and paved road. We will hit it all :)

Riders will be shuttled up to the Peak to Peak near Allenspark to start the ride. We will start up Bunce School Road and ride a route on mostly singletrack and jeep road all the way back to Lyons. I prerode this course last year and busted my hump to finish it in 6.25 hours with minimal breaks. On last years BFR3, we rode the same route but started at Peaceful Valley. With approximately 25 riders, it took us just about 8 hours. The addition of Bunce will add another 45 minutes to one hour.

Here's a link to a few posts of last years goodness. This is not a novice ride. Heck, this isn't really an intermediate/advanced ride either. We'll call this an experts only ride. Be prepared for anything and everything. There are NO BAILOUTS. Well, you can bail, but it means a long, long ride on the road back to anywhere important. If you're in doubt if this ride is for you or not, it probably is not.

Oh, we'll have the grill fired up and a cooler full of beer waiting, too! (and soda)

For those of you not in doubt, we'll see you on 9/27! Looking forward to it.

Left of center recon mission

Big Fall Ride 4 is coming up (Sept 27, Sunday). To prepare, I went off today to do a little recognizance for a potential addition to the route. I mean, last year was tough all but not what I had dreamed of. Although some folks bailed early and the ones that didn't were plenty tired, no one was abolutely wasted and hating life. My goal today was to do some on the ground research to see about adding another 1200' or so of climbing, much of it hike a bike. Left Hand Canyon OHV was in my sites. Although I had originally planned to ride there via Heil Ranch, the plan was changed to driving to LHOHV due to time constraints.

I had thougth about adding the Castle Gulch climb out of James Canyon to the route. From there, we'd be at the top of LHOHV and would be able do descend some sweet singletrack back to the highway. I did find some additional singletrack, but even to climb up to hit it would be downright dastardly to add on after 5+ hours of riding. It would have some hella descending

and some fine narrow and ledgy singletrack

But I'm not sure it would work in very well. We'll see. Perhaps we'll include it on another ride for which I had an idea today. I think we'll keep that one in check til Oct or Nov...

Here's the route down that I intended to take. This would take me back down to James Canyon and the bottom of Castle Gulch, all jeep road.

Don't fall in the straight down for ever open mineshaft. Must be some kind of bird or something living in there. I heard some strange noises coming from the shaft. Maybe it was the ghosts of all the miners that died in this area.

I got to the bottom of Castle Gulch and wanted to explore the opportunity to get down onto the pavement. Looks like the USFS has been doing some creative signing down here. Looks like we'll have to contact the BRD to find out exactly what's up.
From there, the climb was steep and loose but tolerable for quite a bit. Then it turned rocky. Really, really rocky. This was the Castle Gulch that I remembered. I had never been up it before, though. It was quite a hike.

The USFS is a mountain bikers friend.

From the top, there was some crazy steep jeep road descending before the sweet, sweet singletrack.

The singletrack was a bit trenched out in spots, but other than that, was it's normal beautiful Left Hand self. Love it.

So far a good match :) On the steep and fast, the Tomac Snyper 140 did not dissapoint. The Snyper is proving itself to be a super good handling and capable bike.

Big Summer Ride Schedule

Seems like the Redstone crew and friends likes our big rides so much, we're going to start doing them once per month. We'll officially "end" them with our big season capper, the Big Fall Ride in September. These will be definite all day'ers. Meet at the shop at 9am and back for dinner. We'll see about finding some adventure, too, as all rides will be left to on trail interpretation and possible route exploration. Sound like your kind of fun? Sounds like my kind of fun. Read on.


Saturday June 27
The Gold Tour. Not Golden the town, but golden lakes and ridges between LHC and James Canyon. Good stuff. Not as brutal technically, but will have a legitimate crapload of climbing. To be honest, I'm too ascared to preride it. So I won't. 20 min from Lyons


Saturday July 25
Peaceful Tour of the Dick. How about almost everything between Peaceful Valley and Brainard lake? A little Buchanan Pass? Some SSV? Sure. Sourdough? You bet. Little Raven? Got it. We'll only get around 20 miles, but it's 20 miles of the rockiest, most technical trail around. Exhaustion guaranteed for all but the most excruciatingly fit. 30 min from Lyons




Saturday Aug 22
Wildcard. I've been contemplating climbing 3k' in vert to the top of a pass, then dumping down the backside just to see what's there for quite some time now. Every time I've attempted, it takes so long to get to the top, I'm always too tired for more climbing so I've turned around. I would love to do a loop on the other side, then back to the top of the pass. Once you're down the other side though, you are committed to a serious climb back up to the top o the pass. Think of it as a lollipop loop with a mystery flavor wrapper. 45 min drive from Lyons.

September date TBA, probably 26
Big Fall RideIV. We'll drop you off somewhere in the forest and you'll have to ride back to Lyons on as much dirt as possible. Last year was about 8hrs and folks were hurting. We're thinking of adding another hour or so this year. Just for fun.