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.
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