54 Miles of Ryan

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:
click

Dave’s photos at Picasa:
click

And Ryan’s photos at Backpackit:
click