My Happy Place

The Silver Creek Drainage as seen from the Continental Divide

When I first moved to Salida I spent lots of time up on Methodist Mountain, right south of town riding a trail that overlooked Salida. When my horizons expanded, I found that the basin of drainages that flow east from the Continental Divide in the Shadow of Mt Ouray was a magical place. Poncha Creek, Starvation Creek, Silver Creek. The minor drainages: Grays Creek, Tent Creek, Ouray Creek...

My happy place.

The Marshall Pass Road was the narrow gauge railroad route that Otto Mears designed to gain access to the mining towns in the Gunnison Valley. Now it's a dirt road, County Road 200. It's a steady middle-ring climb into my happy place.

As my pattern of behavior has established itself over the years I've been finding myself venturing up into this country, testing the water, every year in May and June. After I've established that the snow is gone, I make as many trips up as I can arrange in June through October. Then at some point in the autumn a series of storms will drift the snow in, and my preferred method of entering my happy place will be rendered invalid. And I won't see it again until May...

At some point I may not be able to leave this world alone from November through April, and I'll have to figure out how to haul my butt in using snowshoes or skis. But the rolling wheel is my drug of choice. As of today, my practice is to leave that country to my imagination during the cold months when I can't ride there.

In all the late springs of this last decade I have had the distinct pleasure of returning to my happy place after a period of absence. Today I made the trip up to Marshall Pass, the traverse of the Continental Divide over to the headwaters of Silver Creek, and down. What a pleasure. What a magical thing that the combination of my body and bicycle can take me there.

To my happy place.
 

The journey begins by rolling up the road; out of the sage and pinon juniper and into the ponderosa pine. Then the ponderosa forest gives way to aspen-fir forest. The road at times passes through long stretches of classic Colorado aspen forest.
 

Saturday, June 2, 2012 was a beautiful sunny morning in Salida. It continued to be a beautiful sunny morning on up the road through the aspen, but as I approached Marshall Pass I became aware of a storm. It was early, just after 10 AM, but clearly a storm was brewing over on the western side of the divide. I took the above picture without stopping my pedaling. I was riding no-hands with a camera in my hands because I didn't want to lose any time.

I hoped to be able to scoot over to the south in front of this storm and get off the divide before the storm started doing its thing. The world really wasn't tilted the way the picture looks, but I took it just as the no-hands riding started to go bad. I didn't crash, and I pedaled faster after I put the camera back away.
 

I skipped the singletrack that heads south from Marshall and took the jeep road that parallels it to save time. I had been hearing about lots of trees down on the singletrack, which would slow me down, and I guessed the road would be quicker either way. I was headed toward the storm--it was mostly south of Marshall and appeared to be moving east; we were on an intersection path. It wasn't raining, but it was noisy. I hurried. I really thought I might be able to drop into Silver Creek before it got bad.

But it didn't work. After I got just past where the singletrack Colorado Trail/Continental Divide Trail joins the jeep road I was on, the lightening started to flash directly overhead and the delay between flash and thunder told me it was within a mile. I stopped and sat on a log under a grouping of fir trees to wait it out.

After I'd been there 10 or 15 minutes a little graupel fell, and I took the opportunity to photograph a piece of it. In the picture it just looks like a little white stone, but it's frozen water of about the same density as Styrofoam.
 

Once it seemed safe to continue, I got to the place I call the lunch spot. It overlooks the Silver Creek drainage, and has Antora Peak to the south as a backdrop. It looked like whatever rain the storm had was being dropped on Antora, and maybe a little graupel glaze as well.

I'm so lucky. I can get up on a Saturday morning, leave from my house on a bicycle, ride it through this country and then down 20 miles of singletrack back to the highway that gets me home in no time.

Magic.

Welcome back summer.

SBFL Errand Running

Tuesday I took the day off. It's rare that I get a 4-day weekend, and I needed one. And of course, there was the matter of a necessary errand to be performed for the Salida Big Friggin' Loop. So I rode up there.

Plan A was to take a new route over into Bassam Park based on some topo map scouting. I saw a road that appeared to skirt around the east side of Aspen Ridge. I have done that climb to Aspen Ridge from the Salida side enough times, especially this year. It's kind of yucky.

So I was looking forward to having a new way over there, and a nice lollipop loop looked better than an out-and-back to Futurity (where I needed to be to perform my preparation task). I took my right turn following the GPS line I'd loaded. Beautiful road. When I was maybe half a mile in a truck pulling a horse trailer past me, and the folks in that truck gave me the once over. I wondered if I had some body part inadvertently hanging out. They drove on past, but in another mile or so I came to a locked gate with no trespassing signs all over it, and they were parked on the other side of it, presumably waiting to be sure I didn't climb the fence.

Private land. Meh.

I turned around and then climbed over Aspen Ridge. Meh.
 

In futurity I did a little art and craft project, creating from simple materials some highly collectible tchotchkes which I hid in a place to be revealed to the long course riders. Possessions of one of these little talismans will grant the SBFL bearer a time credit which could change their standings. And they are beatiful, magical little artifacts. The Franklin Mint would love to be hawking these bad boys on the shopping channel.
 

Futurity is a cool little place. Fun to imagine what kind of tiny community it was back in its mining days.
 

Saw a bear on my way back. I was doing the slow grinding climb back up to Aspen Ridge. I saw movement to my right, and there was a medium-sized bear ambling up the slope toward the road. We were on intersecting paths. He was less than 50 feet away when I saw him, stopped, and put a foot down. He apparently had not noticed me when I was rolling, but when I stopped he looked up at me, turned on his heel and took off back from where he'd come.

No time to get the camera. Cool to see him, not sure I've ever been that close to one in the wild!

 I was pleased that after resting only one day from my 70 mile ride from Salida to BV and back I was able to do another big ride (45 miles and 6,250 ft of climbing) with really a pretty reasonable amount of energy and staying power. Maybe I'll be finishing the SBFL!

SBFL course review Part I

Late spring, summer approacheth. Also, for me, the Salida Big Friggin' Loop approacheth. I'm trying to get fit, and by golly there's nothing that feeds my soul like getting up early and riding from my house into the high mountains to spend all day up there.
 

Sunday May 27 I did such a thing. I rode up to Blanks Cabin. On the way I tried to capture the beauty of a horse pasture with a field of alfalfa being irrigated in the background under the sun rising higher into the sky. Ah.
 

Then I got up onto Forest Road 252 and climbed up to jump on the Colorado Trail at Blanks Cabin.

 

The first mile or so of trail from there is quite brutal, mostly hike-a-bike, but then you get into the smooth narrow traverse at roughly 10,000 feet that's among the best singletrack in Chaffee County.



It's Real, real purty.



The plan for the day, and the plan for the SBFL, is to continue past Chalk Creek on the lovely Mt. Princeton section of the CT.
 

Climbing from the hot springs up to the continuation of the CT gutted me. Won't be any easier in 10 days when the SBFL happens, but hopefully I'll be slightly fitter than I was Sunday. Took me almost 8 hours to get to BV. Late lunch at Punky's then a tough ride on the highway with holiday weekend RV traffic back home.

I rode 72 miles, left the house at 6:30 and got home around 4. Just shy of 7,000 ft of climbing.

Good day, but hard. But good.

June in May

Took my first ride on the Silver Creek to 285 section of the Rainbow on Saturday. No new pictures. I already have hundreds of shots of the various pretty parts of that trail from the various times of year when I have ridden it. I'd have to say it's my favorite local trail.


It could be July up there peoples--other than that the aspen leaves are still brand-new lime green and the creek crossings are just a little bit up. Sunday Kathy and I rode the other Salida section of the Rainbow, the Bear Creek bit, though we just looped back down; a little routine known as Cali Loop. Took the above photo of a little creek found at the site of a button-hook turn about midway across from Bear to Methodist.


The May 20 that was a June 10.

Riding through Feta Cheese

Sunday I was sore from trailwork Saturday. Got a slow start drinking coffee and making old man noises every time I had to get up from my chair. But the day was beautiful, kissed with a good solid batch of moisture from a late afternoon rain. 

Clouds were starting to build, so I decided I better do something if I was going to do anything. I rode up into the Arkansas Hills, North Backbone Trail out to Ute Trail and up to do the Cottonwood loop.

There were some kind of sinister-looking clouds up the road, so I mustered as much energy as I could to keep it going. One of the clouds was drifting west to east into my path. When I was about halfway up the 40 minutes of Ute Trail to the turn-off, little rectangular pellets of graupel (I've been calling it graffle for years--thank you wikipedia!) starting falling, hundreds of feet apart.

As I continued to climb, they kept getting a little bigger and a little closer together. 

When I turned off onto 181 they started being a little more like a snow storm than like a thin shower of confetti. Usually I see graupel as little balls, like the styrofoam scraps that fall out if you tear hard styrofoam apart. But these were rectangular/angular. And now they were starting to be bigger. By the time I was on the jeep road to the Cottonwood turnoff, they were falling thick and accumulating. They reminded me of the chunks of feta cheese you would see on your greek salad. Every size between tiny and as big as the end of your thumb.

I didn't take any pictures of that funny graupel. I was really thinking that forward motion was a better idea than stopping to take pictures, especially since I was wearing a cotton t-shirt and shorts. The shell was in my pack and I would have stopped to put it on if I'd gotten any colder, but the leg warmers were home. I also was out of water. 

My preparation for this ride wasn't stellar--I blame the trail work.

As usual, the weather was milder once I got into the bottom of Cottonwood Gulch. And then I rode out of it entirely. The sun was shining brightly when I rolled past this blooming claret cup near the bottom.





Ah, Springtime in the Rockies. 

New Trail Project!

The good people at Salida Mountain Trails have started the Little Rainbow Extension project. It will be a little over 3 miles of hand-build trail to complement the nearly 7 miles of machine-built trail that comprises today's Little Rainbow, part of the Methodist Mountain Trail System south of Salida.

I was asked to crew lead, so it was time to find the gloves and gnarly old carhartts and get out there to dig some bench and raise some dust.

I really like the alignment of this trail. This may turn out to be the woodsiest trail of the local Salida low-elevation trail systems.

Here's a scraped out gully that was full of pine cones. 

Needs to be a bench...

And there's a bench.

A selection of photos from on down the new trail:

About a half mile of new out of 20 or so volunteers. Good productive day!

April Aspen Leaves

I asked around this week about the Rainbow between Bear Creek and Methodist Mountain.

This bit of Rainbow Trail is south of Salida--the slope of Methodist is a big part of our town's setting. It is our southern horizon.The trail was introduced to me the first time I came to Salida specifically to be in Salida. I came for the Banana Belt Mountain Bike Race in 1997 or '98, can't remember exactly. That classic race course took us up the Bear Creek Road and then traversed Methodist Mountain on the Rainbow.

Well, anyway, this bit of the Rainbow is right up there near town, and it's the first high singletrack in the area to melt out and open in the Spring. What I heard was that it was dry, but that the big winds we've had this year had dropped lots of trees. I also heard that the moto community had been up clearing trees. But I knew I was taking a chance. Maybe it was a tangle of blowdowns, maybe it was open and good to go.



I found a trail that was dry. Lots and lots of down trees, but through which the chainsaws had made a path. Most surprising for April 28, aspen almost fully leafed out. Leaves, at 9,000 feet in the Rockies, April 28. New aspen leaves are supposed to appear in late May. Maybe the 20th. But May, not April.



Here's a close-up of a young aspen, with leaf buds that are popping open. The fully mature leaves will be out by mid-week.

It's dry people. The snow is almost gone. The Arkansas has already gotten a little bit discolored. That should be 3 weeks away.

Reminds me of one of the first years I lived here. In 2002-03 we had a drought. Nothing turned green that summer. Irrigation water was scarce at first, then it dried up completely. The Hayman Fire burned up Tarryall and the Lost Creek Wilderness. In New Mexico, the Carson and Santa Fe national forests were closed.

Maybe that's what we have in store for 2012. Dry, wildfires, restrictions and closures.



But for now, I'm going to enjoy my mountains. Today was nice. Of course it's a treat to enjoy late May riding in late April.

Doing it the Hard Way™

Late this past week I was thinking about a scouting problem that I had uncovered when looking at my topo maps with the two SBFL routes drawn on them.

From a place shown on the topo maps as Black Dumps, an intersection of dirt roads overlooking Bassam Park, my route lines went down off the ridge following a line that was not on any route showing on the map. That doesn't mean there isn't a route there, only that it needs to be confirmed that there is one.

The route line came from the original Harvest Moon Ride. Back in 2005 we went that way. But from last week's scouting trip, I could not remember 5 ways out of Black Dumps. I could remember 4. I felt the need to put my eyeballs and tires onto the segment of the route that I had included in both Standard and Long Loop courses.



So I needed to get up there one more time.

I had a little extra time this week since I had worked some overages. And I made my first bike commute on Tuesday, so I felt like I could do that again but then take the afternoon off and go home the long way.

I also wanted a nice clean GPX of the route from the end of the Midland Trail, up Shields Gulch and the Lenhardy Cut-off to McGee Gulch and back to Highway 24/285.

So I rode my Hunter Cycles dirt tourer to work with everything I'd need for a big backcountry ride. It started out as a normal road ride to BV, but then I hit an evil head wind about half way and had to grind my way the last hour into that mofo just to get to work. Ouch.

I worked through the morning then left BV at 1 PM and headed up the Midland. By about 2:45 I was across 24/285 and heading east toward Bassam Park. In my scramble to leave the house I had neglected to load a GPX of the short route that I could follow. I needed to get to Black Dumps, and I wound up going from memory. But memory can be fallible.

I encountered a left turn off the main road into Bassam Park at about 3:30. It was marked Castle Rock Gulch 2 miles, Dry Lakes Gulch 4 miles. I remembered Dry Lakes Gulch, I had come up that way the week before during my long route scouting trip. And I thought I already was on the Castle Rock Gulch Road (turns out I was, Castle Rock Gulch is pretty long. Odd that they were saying it was 2 miles because I had been riding in it already for at least 2 according the the topo.)

Well, that road was wrong, and it's not practical to make it part of either of the loops, but it was beautiful. The whole time I was on it I was worried that it was going to take me out into the middle of nowhere (which that whole area would be considered by some standards). So I was kind of nervous and hurrying, and therefore took no pictures. Too bad, it was nice. I will go back sometime though.



Eventually I did find myself back on the road that is part of the long loop. Shortly after I saw that I was in good shape route-wise, 4 or five elk ran across the road in front of me. This one needed to check me out for a while. He (or she, too early for antlers) stood and let me take pictures for almost a minute.

Chaffee County Landmark, Ouray Peak doing a peek-a-boo between hills along the west side of Bassam Park

Well, when I got to Black Dumps I found that it was a good thing I was doing this. There was no road going in the direction that the track from the original Harvest Moon Ride took back in '05. After looking hard for some way off that ridge directly down to the road to Aspen Ridge I saw a bootleg ATV trail that the forest service had closed. Ah, we must have followed that ATV trail back when it was still there.

No way am I going to route the SBFL down a closed trail. The routes are both going to need to be altered. Good to know now!



So my route confirmation task was complete. Now about riding the rest of the way home... Time to climb up and over 10,300 foot Aspen Ridge.

I was Pretty. Darned. Tired.

With the 25 miles I had ridden, much of it into a gnarly headwind and the 30+ miles I had already ridden from BV, I was well into a riding day that would turn out to be as big as any ride I have done probably since July of last year when I developed a knee problem that kept me from riding pain-free for more than 3 hours.

I actually had not ridden over Aspen Ridge from the west side for a couple years. Funny  how your memories wind up being a little different from the reality. I think that what happens is part of a self-defense mechanism: when you're put through a harrowing ordeal like a car accident or The Cascade Cream Puff, you don't store very complete memories. Your brain helps you cope by forgetting the details of the painful situation.

I made it home about 6:30 PM after a hard core descent off Aspen Ridge. Bikes without suspension make you pay big time for hurrying off that divide. Ouch.

The GPS told me that the part of my trip that involved getting home from BV was just shy of 50 miles. A little over 5,000 feet of climbing. Add to that the 25 miles spent getting to BV on the road, which has a little over 1,000 feet of climbing (and featured a painful headwind in this case) and you have a pretty hard day. I'd call it about 60% of a Leadville 100, but without any aid stations or cheering crowds.

For early season, this was a hard ride. But it feels good that I could do it--nice to have that knee issue behind me. And I did get some good scouting done.

As a postscript, on Saturday while hiking with Kathy and her mom I ran into my friend Taf, who's a former Ft Lewis College mountain bike team racer, Arkansas Valley ranch girl (I think she's a 4th generation Chaffee County resident) and who is signed up for the SBFL. She and her friend Mark had just ridden across Bassam Park and down through Futurity. They told me that there is a way to pass through Futurity without hike-a-bike. Then Mark sent me a GPX.

So I have some choices to make in terms of finalizing courses. As of now, the long course goes through Futurity using what had been an option with hike-a-bike, and the short course now doesn't even have the option of going through Futurity. I could allow the short course to go through Futurity, with or without the hike-a-bike. And I could allow the long course to take the non-hike-a-bike route that Taf promises me is there (and I have a GPX that shows it thanks to Mark.)

But I'm more inclined to make the long course riders see Futurity the Hard Way™.

When I've had a chance to rest a little more I'll make the final, final course GPXs. There are two new ones out on the SBFL site now, and they may wind up being final. I promise to have the finals posted by April 30.

Scouting SUCCESS!

The National Weather Service was predicting a very gloomy weekend, and I was bumming because I wanted to finish up my scouting. Much of my free time last week, mostly in the mornings before work, had been spent messing around with my GPS trying to get it to work the way I need to have it work to be a route-finding tool. Finally advice from the GPS route-finding expert, Scott Morris got me to a solution. I loaded my hand drawn route from Trout Creek to the ghost town of Futurity, connecting to the SBFL course. And I started looking for my window of opportunity.
   

Saturday morning dawned mostly clear. Get while the gettin's good I say. I loaded up my bike and gear, drove to 9,500 ft Trout Creek Pass with warm clothes and food. And off I went.

I love a morning in a remote place in Colorado. Even when it's 30° F. This was a really good one, because it had the thrill of exploration and discovery all loaded up and ready to travel.
   
Waugh Mountain, a landmark I track during many of my Arkansas Hills/South Park type adventures

This part of the SBFL is going to feature lots of views of wide open South Park country.
   

This guy circled around me for 10 minutes or so while I peeled off clothes and ate a little food. He was more curious than cautious, but finally headed for the horizon when I re-mounted my bike and started moving.



Beautiful morning. Breezy, chilly, and the threat of weather. But as of 8:30 AM it was really pretty nice out.



As I followed the line on my GPS, a couple different times the route took turns that I wouldn't have picked without some clues that I'd gathered studying a map on a computer while drinking coffee. The third one passed through an opening in a fence with a sign that said No Outlet. It was a 90° right turn onto a much more faint doubletrack than what I was on. I stopped for a minute. What if it took me on a multi-mile wild goose chase that ended at a campsite up in the trees or a locked gate that has a Private Property, No Trespassing sign?

Well, it was still early. I was following something that looked right on the map, and I figured I might as well do what I'd come to do: Scout that route.



The double track went from faint to almost completely gone. At one point it looked like it might be heading right for a house, maybe a ranch house. But then it climbed up further on the slope and it became clear that the house was just a regular house in the Ranch of the Rockies subdivision. It went along next to fences a couple times, then popped out onto a graded gravel subdivision road that was so rarely used that it had grass growing on it. My little line followed those subdivision roads for less than a mile, then across a cattleguard and back onto a regular BLM double track. Woo Hoo! The route is solid, and it's relatively primitive! And the views are stunning. Win!



Just as the little line predicted, it turned west and headed back up into the Arkansas Hills, following a numbered Forest Service Road to where it would meet with the old Harvest Moon Ride route. Once I was there, at a place labeled on the maps as Black Dumps, I was golden. I had my SBFL Long Route.

Only one bit of route that I had not seen before remained, the bit from Black Dumps through the ghost town of Futurity into Bassam Park. But that was just a bonus. If it was good, good. If not I could still use what I'd just ridden to build the SBFL Long Loop.



I passed through the Black Dumps, a 5-way intersection of Forest Service Roads and followed my little line to the south. It did some climbing, a fair amount actually, then topped out at a little divide and started back down. I was watching my little line and the road ahead because I appeared to be approaching one of those infamous 90° right turns.

I passed a very much closed trail that the Forest Service had clearly put some effort into obliterating. There was a steel Closed To Motor Vehicles sign, a bulldozed hole at the start, and many many down dead aspen. Couldn't be it, so I kept rolling. But the GPS told me, nope, turn around. That's it.

Just like earlier, I had a decision to make. But now it wasn't earlier. I'd been out there for nearly 3 hours, I was many miles from the car, and random snowflakes were swirling around.

Crap.

I was about to head back to Black Dumps, then said to myself, "I don't have a motor vehicle." The topo on the GPS showed a fairly short climb to a saddle maybe 250 of elevation higher than where I stood. I could kind of see it through the tangle of leafless aspen. "Might as well see what's up there." Off I went, pushing the bike over deadfall.



You guessed it. About 15 minutes later I crested the summit. The sky was looking a little gnarly, but I could see most of the mountains across the valley. Couldn't be that bad yet if I could mostly see the tops of 14ers. Let's see how tangled the descent would be.



I rode down off the saddle, and almost immediately onto... singletrack! How long might it have been since mountain bike tires rolled on this bit of trail? Had they ever? Deer tracks, elk and deer poop, almost no barriers to rolling along at a nice clip.



In less than five minutes I was in Futurity. Success! Success #2!



I rolled down a good road out of Futurity onto the main Forest Service road through Bassam Park. Took the right turn and started making my way back to Trout Creek Pass to the car.  Came up on this little flock of Bighorn Sheep in Castle Rock Gulch. Then crossed 24/285 into Chubb Park and climbed up and around to finish a 38-mile 5 hour voyage of discovery.

Sweet!

SBFL is going to be killer. I've got the plan. There will be a standard 90 mile route, a long 102 mile route using the stuff I found today, but just getting onto the normal route at Black Dumps. From Black Dumps there will be the option to do the extra climbing and hike-a-bike needed to roll through Futurity. I'm going to plant some small rocks there with paint markings that will be picked up by riders as proof that they did that option. Fun!

Spring is happening

Cottonwood Gulch, and just a single picture. Nice shot of little old Salida from Mae B. trail. Starting to green up!

Scouting Interruptus

In a couple months I'm hosting a little bike ride called the Salida Big Friggin' Loop, part of the Colorado Endurance Series. My man Matt approached me about putting it on last winter after having seen my Harvest Moon Ride write-up.


Riding up into Chubb Park toward the Buffalo Peaks.

We posted the GPX file from that Harvest Moon Ride, which happened WAY back in 2005, when we advertised the SBFL. But there were things about that route that were not ideal, so I've been meaning to buff it up a little and make it better. That means riding stuff and checking it out.

So I drew some lines on topos using TopoFusion, the state of the art in GPS software for mountain bike endorphin junkies. And I loaded some of those lines into my GPS and headed to Buena Vista to ride from town. From there I would ride up the very familiar Midland Trail, which is what I did with those Feier brothers all those years ago. But my plan this time was to ride up Shields Gulch to the Lenhardy Cutoff rather than jumping onto highway 24/285 like we did back in '05. I wanted to ride to Trout Creek Pass, and from there look for another route east toward Bassam Park and Aspen Ridge.


Here's where the Denver and South Park narrow guage line took a big turn out in the park to head back toward Trout Creek Pass, where it would cross out of the Arkansas River Basin into the South Platte Basin (aka South Park)

Of course the Midland Trail is based on a railroad grade, a 19th century one. There's so much I could say about how important the Denver and South Park Railroad was to the history of the Upper Arkansas, and then get into the rivalry between the Denver and Rio Grande and the D & SP... Some would be fascinated, others bored to tears. Suffice to say, the railroad ran their tracks from South Park over Trout Creek and into the Arkansas Valley, and then over into the Gunnison Valley after building the Alpine Tunnel. Interesting stuff, for those of us who are interested in such things.

 But let's get back to my scouting trip. I rolled up Shields Gulch, turned right onto the Lenhardy Cutoff, and climbed to the pass over Limestone Ridge into Chubb Park. Then I pedaled up the nice gentle road in Chubb Park that heads up toward the Buffalo Peaks before turning back to the east to Trout Creek Pass.

My GPS had a track loaded that I had drawn which would (hopefully) take me southeast from Trout Creek, skirting the south edge of South Park and eventually turning west back up into the Arkansas Hills to meet with the original route.

Well, I got to Trout Creek and I was a couple hours into my trip; not fresh, but not crippled either. But the track I had drawn was not showing on my GPS' map screen. Confound it! I messed with the GPS quite a bit, standing by the side of a dirt road changing settings and pushing buttons (Geek!). Nothing helped.

So I started off in the direction I had remembered mapping, but soon came to an intersection that could have been right, could have been wrong. The obvious choice was how to get back to town: down. I decided I better just settle for a good bit of route recorded on the GPS and ready to go and a day well spent, and resolved to figure out why tracks were not showing up on my GPS map.
 

I was at the head of Mushroom Gulch, which I rode down and enjoyed quite a bit. Very pretty views west to the Sawatch.



These beautiful rock formations with a lovely green sheen of lichen are called The Castles.

Nice ride. Back down to BV and home.

Fruita Trip, Coda

Monday morning was chilly and moist. There were raindrops on the cars in the parking lot and substantial snow visible on the grand mesa to the east and book cliffs up north. 


The plan was to drive up over the Monument and maybe take a walk on one of the half hour tourist trails that go to a nice overlooks. The higher we got, the more snow. And it was gorgeous. 





I got lots of pictures, but we missed our chance to walk more than about 150 feet from the car. We just weren't diligent about finding the right trail, and when it became obvious that we were heading back down to GJ we didn't have the will to turn around. 


We got a sandwich in town, stopped at Vitamin Cottage for some groceries and headed home.


Good trip.