It's about time... for the epic Colorado Trail ride!

Hello blogging world. Lauren here - hence the pink text!

What a weekend! Tyler's family came into town and we definitely stayed busy. Started off the weekend with some tasty Mexican food from Cafe Mexicali and a car wash fundraiser for the Fort Follies women's cycling team. It proved to be much more difficult than I expected to convince people to turn off the busy road and let us wash their car. 

The fundraiser turned out to be a huge success, with some great entertainment from a good friend. I'm sure the people driving by were amused by him rubbing soap all over himself and dancing around, because we got some laughs out of it!

Saturday night we were back in Denver preparing for an epic ride that we have been talking about going on for a quite a while! Here's a link to the strava recording from Sunday:

Colorado Trail Segment 6: Kenosha to Breckenridge

Sunday morning we loaded up and headed out to the trail with 

a truck full of bikes and people ready to ride!

Here is Tyler crossing one of the bridges we encountered.

       Richard and Mikaleh ((still smiling!))

      

                                                          Into the wilderness we go!

              Me catchin' a little bit of down hill action.

            

 Top of the first big climb - lunch time! It was a tad bit windy at the top, but the view was totally worth the pain! Gotta love burrito wraps, schneider's pretzels, and homemade honey peanut butter bars!

 Along the trail we encountered quite a bit of terrain. From nice flowy singletrack, to gnarly rock filled down hill segments, to steep rooty uphills. The Colorado Trail had a lot to offer and we soaked up every bit we could get. Saw an impressive amount of other riders out there too! Tyler and I have always talked about backpacking the CT, but after that it may just be too slow paced for me. ;)

Tyler rockin the trail like a pro! Awesome descent into Breckenridge.

All in all we had a great weekend, and epic ride! Family, friends, bikes, and beer are quite the combination. Definitely cannot complain. As I sit here typing I keep thinking how I can't wait for the next epic adventure, but then I realize my legs are still feeling pretty dead. 

So we shall rest up until next time!

Xena joins the family

Laurens dad came in for the weekend with a new member of our jeep family! So of course what is the best thing to do with a brand new vehicle? Go take it up into the mountains and scrape it up on the rocks!

We loaded up and headed out for a quick trip into the high country. Our destination was Yankee-doodle lake, a small lake fed by snowfields.

Yankee-doodle lake

 A couple of narrow, old forest service roads made up the Jenny creek trail. Rocky, with lots of water crossing (sometimes the trail and creek merged!) made for the perfect testing grounds of the new rubi.

Jenny Creek trail

Crickin!

High county accommodations

Some decent little rocky areas

Some snow still up high (almost 11,000')

Jenny Lake just up the road from Yankee-doodle

Afternoon storm moving in on us on our way out

The new jeep did awesome! Probably the most comfortable way to get out in the backcountry, and bluetooth connects phone to stereo... what!? I have a feeling this vehicle will be perfect for any type of future adventure :)

Happy 4th!!!

The 4th we took some time off the bike and spent our time with some visiting family. We decided to take the visitors and dogs up for a hike. Up Gray Rock right out of Foco!

The hike turned out to be a lot more then we bargained for and quickly became an all day adventure, but it was worth it for the views from up top!!!

Awesome little lake right near the peak

Then the next day we decided to take a lazy day on the river. We grabbed some tubes and a paddle board. Had to see what all the hype was about! 

It turned out to be quite the experience! Very challenging to keep balanced while taking on small rapids (for me, Lauren was doing handstands on the thing)... Props to the extreme-SUPers!!!

Then we all crammed into the back of the jeep for a drive-in movie :)

Of course we couldn't go without a ride, so three of us went out for a nice ride in Lory state park.

Lory Loop Strava link

Crusty Butt

We had an EPIC weekend. It was great to escape from the big city and get back into the high country, it just feels right! We rolled into town late and got camp setup, we ended up staying up Slate River Road in the national forest campsites. It was absolutely gorgeous being camped right in the valley!

At the top of Monarch Pass, we will be back for the Monarch Crest trail later!!

Lo uses her gymnast skills to cross a creek

 Our first day was a combination of 4 trails: Reno, Flag, Bear creek, Deadman's gulch. This turned out to be a 20 mile, 3500 ft day.

Reno/flag/bear/deadman strava

The loop was made up of 3 big climbs and 3 big descents. The first climb up (Reno) was a long one, but it was easy going on a well maintained road and had spectacular views of the backside of the butte. Going down Flag was fast and flowy through high country meadows. We soon had smiles plastered to our faces and were ready for the next climb.

Our newly made group works its way through the mud

The middle climb was the easiest, rolling up and down through meadows made it almost fun!!! Going down Bear creek was an absolute BLAST! The trail was very well built, fast, flowy, rock gardens, drops and so on. Everybody was having fun, and at this point we had mixed in with another group from Durango and picked up a long time local. All around smiles at the bottom. How lucky are we!







Right about the time we started to climb the final stretch, it began to rain pretty good. The dusty trail then started to stick to the tires like wet flour, sucking up pebbles with it. Needless to say, it made for a slower climb up. But we all conquered the climb and regrouped at the top for the Deadman's descent. The trip down was a slippery and rutted out 37 switchbacks. Rough on the wrists! One river crossing at the bottom and we were off the trail.

Yes, that's a tamale in my burrito.

We then hit town to grab some food and check out the bike festivities. It is said that CB has the original bike festival (and mountain biking was invented there) so we wanted in! There was a 24 hr cruiser crit, which we did a few laps of. We hit up a small Mexican restaurant for some tasty eats after a hard days ride and just enjoyed the small town.

Sunset time

Sean and Tony reach the top

The next day we hit the famous Trail 401. I had ridden this before and wanted to share the experience with my friends! This is best ridden as a loop, you ride up a dirt road from the little town of Gothic to the top of  Schofield Pass. Then its a steep climb to the top of the trail and pretty much all downhill from there!

401 strava

360* of awesome from the top

Headed back down!

Funky little bridge stretch