Colorado Trip

Awesome trip, can't wait to go back. We biked some pretty sweet routes, and there must be a thousand others in the area that are just as sick. Erica and I both rented a Giant OCR-1 with triple cranks dressed in 105. $50 for two days, much cheaper than spending big bucks bring our bikes on the plane and easier than shipping. The bikes didn't fit the best, I had an XL and Erica rode a medium, but it wasn't bad. The tall headtubes gave a very upright position so it felt pretty relaxed which was good for touring.

Being a weekend trip, my plane left at 5:30AM EST on Saturday morning, which meant I had to get up at 3:30 AM EST, the equivalent of 1:30AM RMT. Between biking every day and a severe lack of sleep, I was exhausted.

With Working Man's Stage Race coming up I was being pretty cautious not to go out too hard and stick to light to medium tempo, but when you do 6000'+ of vertical in a day, you're going to feel tired no matter how slow you go.

Day 1: Flagstaff Road

We didn’t have a whole lot of time on Saturday due to travel and didn’t make it out riding until well after noon. I think I read about Flagstaff road on northeastcycling.com and it looked pretty sick on the map so we decided it would be a good local road to give a shot.

Flagstaff heads out of Boulder on the south side and twists up and behind the flat irons. There are a number of switchbacks on the road and a lot of great views of Boulder. According to my Garmin, our starting elevation was 5200’, and I think we topped out around 7800’. This includes starting from Pearl St. in Boulder.

We were both pretty thankful to have triples on the way up. I think most of the climb could have been done on a double without too much trouble, but there were some sections near the top that must’ve been 12%+. Turning the 26(?)-25 at about 70 rpm was plenty hard for these sections anyways. Maybe it was the altitude, who knows.

Day 2: Vail Pass

After the long day on Saturday including getting up at 1:30 AM, doing Flagstaff Road, and meeting up with my Aunt and Uncle for dinner (and two bottles of wine), we somehow got up before 6 AM. It was kind of funny because we had set an alarm on our cell phones for 8 AM, and by the time it went off we were already in the car well on our way to Frisco.

The Frisco / Lake Dillon area is pretty sweet, being a hub to a ton of good bike trails both paved and dirt. There were paved bike paths that you could take including east to Keystone, south to Breckenridge, and west to Vail. It would also make a good starting point if you wanted to do Loveland Pass (12,000’).

We decided to take the path to Vail mostly just because it was the longest. I think the others were about 10 miles each way. Starting elevation was 8900’ and climbed to about 10,700’ by the top of Vail Pass. Along the way we went past Copper where they were having a half marathon.

The bike path was unreal the entire way. Some of it was pretty straight; a lot of it was really twisty. The grade wasn’t steep, but after 15 miles of subtle grade we were pretty tired and kinda sick of going 12-14mph.

At the top of Vail Pass we overheard someone say it was 5 miles down to Vail so we decided to go for it. I figured that even if it was 6% average grade that’d make for 1500’ of climbing at worst on the way back, ha! After descending for what felt like forever, we passed a sign that said it was 11 miles back up to the top, and we still had 4 miles to go. It was pretty disheartening to know you have 30 miles back to the car and nearly 3000’ of vertical.

In Vail we had a sweet lunch, took it easy for a bit, then headed back. Amazing what a good meal can do for your riding, I think we made it over the pass more easily than on the way there. Once over the pass we got to make the best descent I’d ever done. The grade wasn’t too steep, but it was just right to keep your speed around 30 mph with some tight hairpins and LOTS of good curves. I took a video of a brief part near the top. It went on like this for 6 or 7 miles.