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.