Finally! After missing the bike parade two years in a row due to, uh, unforeseen drinking too much the night before… yeah, we made it to this years Tour De Fat bike parade. Turns out this year was a world record for the largest organized bicycle parade… I was told the final tally was around 4,800 people.

This ended up being, hands down, some of the most fun I’ve had on a bike. MK was in town with friends from Estes, everyone was in costume and riding cool bikes. We all met up at James’s house with others, had mimosas and champagne before heading down to New Belgium. The craziness began with a drunk guy wiping out on the train tracks on the way down to the brewery. What a hoot. Here’s K8 & James at New Belgium before the parade started (click on the pic to go the to flickr photo set):

Starting some time last year I started taking Monday afternoons off from work, making up the time typically Tuesdays and Thursdays. Actually taking advantage of the so called “Flex Time.” Anywhoo – this is great because my buds Ryan and Miles typically have Sundays and Mondays off, so it gives us at least a chance to hang out each week.

This Monday, we actually rallied and met up down in Golden to ride some new trail just out of town. I think it was called the Cinder Cone trail. JJ was even able to ditch work for a few hours to come roll with us. I forgot my camera, but Miles had his and took a few pics… here’s our “bad ass” shot:

Click on the pic above to go to the flickr photo set for a few more.

The trail is not technical at all, but rather fast rolling with lots of ups and downs. It can surprise you by several sections with exposure and sharp corners. Fun fun…

Today was the annual Mt. Evans hill climb which is also the state hill climb championships. K8 is now peaking in her fitness for the season and was coming off a 3rd place finish in last weekends Mike Horgan Hill Climb (one she struggled to finish two years ago). Mt. Evans is just about 7,000 vertical feet of climbing in 28 miles finishing at 14,260 feet. Its without a doubt the biggest and highest climb of the road season. She did not sleep well all week so she wasn’t feeling optimistic about being able to keep up the momentum.

Well, she placed 2nd overall, 1st in the Women’s Pro 1-2 field making her this year’s state champion!!! WHOO HAAh! She also took off 8mins 30secs off of her time from last season and swears her performance was due to her new choice performance drink: Pedialyte. Next up Salida…

I took this Friday off and J came up to the Fort to go biking. We went up to Dadd’s Gulch. This was the only trail up the Poudre that neither of us had done. The ride was great, not as long as I expected, but kind of a mix between Young’s and Hewlett’s in terms of terrain. It has several river crossings, forest, some dirt/jeep roads. A bit anti-climatic at the end as it ends up on dirt roads with camp grounds. But it was lots of fun and good company. Here is the ONE pic that just made this trip remarkable… somehow I spotted this thing off the trail, a dead something or other, fully in tact. We had to get some pics:

    

Sometime last year I was sitting in a team meeting a work. We were chatting while waiting for everyone to show up. I was talking about how I had been all over Colorado but have never seen the southern portions of it. My co-worker Alan mentioned he had a family cabin in Pagosa and “…maybe you could use it sometime.” I’m not sure how serious he was but a year later I was able to con Alan into letting us use his cabin for this Memorial Day weekend. A pipe had frozen in the cabin over the winter so there was no running water, but that also meant no one in Alan’s gigantic family was using it. K8 and I wanted to do a big biking trip and were fine with “roughing” it. So off we went with all our bikes, gear, and a bunch of water. This shot is of the cabin after we arrived Friday night. You can see Georgia dog… we brought her along. She does pretty well in the car and had a fun time running around in the woods.
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Today was the big day of our engagement celebration BBQ. We had been planning this thing for weeks and were expecting about 30 people or so. I got a suggestion earlier in the week from Sean that we should also organize a big bike ride for noon the same day. Since lots of our friends are bikers, why not organize a local ride, bust a loop or so and make it back to the house for beer and grub!? So I sent out an email with the plan I think on Wednesday. Well, Sunday came around, food was in the fridge, keg was on ice, bike was ready to go. I was expecting at least 5 or 6 to be up for the ride, but by noon-thirty no one showed up. Then I get a call from Ryan saying “yo dude, me and Miles are in Loveland, we’ll be there in a few.” They show up, we drink a few beers while getting the bikes loaded up in the truck and catching up on stuff. Since it was just the 3 of us we decided to head up the canyon.

Hewlett Gulch is a fun local ride 11 miles up the Poudre with 13 or so river crossings, meadows and great views. You can ride it as a lollipop which takes a scary loose rocky downhill that doubles back to the river crossing section or you can ride it as an out-and-back. I prefer the lader as it makes the ride longer and the decent through the meadows is super fast and rolling, soooo much fun.

We set off and make our way up the trail. The weather was iffy but we ignored it. A mile or two into the trail you come up to an intersection where the lollipop connects. Here there is also a ditch that’s pretty famous for jumping and has a well tracked out runner up to the launch. We were a bit disappointed to see it had washed out some and definitely not as big as it used to be. But what the heck. We take turns hitting it, filming and taking pictures. Check out Miles (left) flying through the air. Unfortunately my camera sucks at action shots and this one is a bit late, but its the best one of the bunch.

As you can tell from the pics, this spring has been a wet one for Colorado; everything is green and in bloom. Further up the trail we stopped to check out a tree. The picture doesn’t do it any justice but it was beautiful at the time.

Then we started climbing. I rode ahead a ways to snap a few shots of the surroundings. You can see Ryan approaching and Miles in the distance just coming out of the gulch. The second shot is at the top of the 1st meadow – Ryan showing that he can climb no handed.

From here you climb on some more, a second meadow, short rock ascent, descent. We all made it through the one rock garden that’s just before the “whoop.” The whoop is the big ditch like thing….. you get going fast than roll straight up to a short really steep climb. This is where you head left for the lollipop, be we headed right and did the last climb up a meadow to end up on an overlook facing west towards Cameron Pass. Here we are at the top with a good view.

At this point, it started thundering… so we didn’t linger around too long. Downed some gu’s and some water than started heading back. We tackled the one quick climb after the “whoop.” Ryan almost made the whole rock garden. Then on the descent we were right on each other’s tail bombing through the meadows. At one point Miles and I stopped because Ryan disappeared. Turned out he had caught a pedal on the track through the meadow and ate some grass… but was fine. Then onward back through the river crossings… what a blast.

K8 went to the Deer Trail RR this weekend. I didn’t go… it’s an hour east of Denver and not a good race for spectating. The long and short of it is… all was going well until the second half of the race when an experienced rider (who I won’t name here but initials are B.F.) made an abrupt move swerving in front of K8 and took out her front wheel. It was a careless accident and unintentional but unfortunate as K8 went down as well as Erin who basically ran over K8. Road rash, profanities were spewed, adrenaline raged… apparently K8 road like a bleeding bat outta hell immediately after until her chain dropped than got “wanged up” and twisted. She was forced to drop out and hitch a ride back. Coincidentally her number was 13 in this race.

Anywhoo… we failed to get pics of the damage immediately after, but this one is from a couple days after <---

The following day K8, me, Erin, and Heather went and did a monster mountain bike ride to Blue Sky and back from the house. K8 with bandages and all didn't realize how messed up her knee was (probably still going on adrenaline). This ride made me cry like a baby and asking for them to come pick me up in the tuck... I'll skip that part... but by Monday, K8's knee was so bruised and swollen she was out from racing/riding for 2 weeks.

Here are a few more about 10-14 days later:

For one of my first solo rides on the new Ciclon, I decided to go check out the Timber trail. Although I don’t think this trail is that new, I’ve never done it, and I had heard it was open to bikers this year. That and Eric from PUSH said it was one of his new favorites. So heading out from the house I took the usual route of Michaud Lane up and over to Lori. Here’s a picture part way up Michaud just before the steep loose rock section. Good excuse for a breather:

Pressing on I make it down and over to Lori. I went right at the first parking lot and started the trail there. Not more than 300 feet from the beginning around the first bend you see the sign where the Timber trail splits off. The Valley trail continues along the foot hills heading south whereas the timber tail starts immediately climbing west up the ridge.

The Trail winds its way the ridge for a mile or so switching back and forth every now and then. Eventually you get further into the woods and it becomes single track. Its climbing the whole way and I wasn’t quite expecting that but whatever, it was looking to be a great ride. The farther up you get the more switchbacks, then more switchbacks, then really tight switchbacks. I had to dab on several of them just to make the turns. I don’t have my chops down for hopping corners quite yet (especially going uphill).

After quite of bit of this… literally zig zagging the whole time, just before the top I got to a nice clearing with a great view of the park below with the reservoir and Fort Collins out in the distance. The downhill was an absolute blast, fairly technical but rolling and ridable the whole way, still having to dab on a handful of the switchbacks. Then trucked home… probably a 20 miles or so overall.