Coming into the home stretch for this biking season with no 24hrs of Moab planned, we had been talking about doing a big epic, scenic mtb ride up west of Boulder. Ryan took the initiative to organize this years bigun… a 54 mile ride starting in Nederland, riding to the Sourdough trail, to Camp Dick/Peaceful Valley, to a gnarly jeep road climb up and out the St. Vrain trail, then back to Boulder down Canyon road. You can see a map of the journey here.

We started off with 8 from Ned at around 8:30am. We lost two along the way. Kevin bailed a bit early before we really started to get into the woods. He was a bit in over his head for this round… but we’ll be seeing more of Kevin. Then part way into the Sourdough trail, K8 had a sudden fall due to her cleat actually giving away. Her left cleat had pulled loose and a necessary metal piece had popped out and was lost. Without being able fix it and clip in, she decided to turn back and not risk injury – total bummer! This was stupid unfortunate However, she ended up shopping in Boulder with Kate B. of course while the rest of us pressed on.

We took it in stages with several stops to regroup and check the map. In a couple spots we had to back track a half mile or so after taking some wrong turns. Arriving in Camp Dick we thought we could re-fill our water packs but found the spigots had been turned off for the winter season. Took a bit of time to pawn some water off campers, and even stopped at a shack store in Raymond for some Gatorade before the last BIG climb.

In the end, rolling back into Boulder we crashed at Proto’s pizza and prompty ordered 5 beers and 5 large pizzas, polished it all. No mechanicals, no bad falls, and we made it.

You can check out my photos at flickr:
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Dave’s photos at Picasa:
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And Ryan’s photos at Backpackit:
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