The plan for yesterday was to get a good long ride in. We did!
Saturday night we convinced our good friend Mike that a long mountain bike ride would be a whole lot more fun that a flat spin on the roads, and without much thinking he agreed. So, Sunday morning, Mike, Jen and myself packed up our bikes plus lots of water and food and headed North.
Our first stop for the day was the Bobcat Ridge Natural Area just west of Loveland. I had been wanting to ride the trails here for a long time, and it looked to be a good early season ride as most of it is at a reasonable elevation and east facing.
The morning was clear and crisp with a blue sky. A good day for a mountain bike ride. We started out easy on the Valley Loop and made our way around on the valley floor to the Powerline Road, or rather, the Powerline Climb!
The Powerline Climb is on old service road, but once up top of it, it connects with the Ginny Trail which is a pure fun single track trail taking you through the areas that burned back in 2000. The climbing actually doesn’t stop when you get on Ginny Trail. It keeps going up, but eventually tops out to a fantastic view of the snow covered mountains in the west.
From the top it is nothing but a fun twisty downhill single track trail through and around rocks to make it even more fun and interesting; and to keep the speed in check, I’m sure. The Ginny Trail was built by Arrowhead, and is yet another testimony to the quality of their work. Curt Gowdy up in Wyoming is another fine example and has some of the same feel and features to manage the speed of people riding it.
It took about 2 hours to circumnavigate the Bobcat Ridge Natural Area, and it was a fine ride, but we weren’t done riding yet. Next stop was Lory State Park, so we put the bikes back on the car and drove the short way from Bobcat Ridge to the south end of Lory State Park, and got back on the bikes again here. Much like our previous ride at Bobcat Ridge we started out riding up North on the valley floor. Once at the North end of Lory State Park the plan was to go back down on the other side of the valley, but we found a surprise. The Timber Trail was open for bike riding!
My (old) map designates Timber Trail as Foot Only, but the sign at the trail head was clear: Mountain biking allowed, although the sign also warns that this is an “Extreme” trail. We decided to explore, and started climbing up Timber Trail. The first several miles were fantastic, but when we went around a gulch and ended up on a North and East facing aspect we found snow. Lots of snow. We decided to push through it. As Dave says: “It’s not mountain biking unless you’re hiking”, so we started hiking, and hiking, and hiking…
On our way up we met a couple groups of hikers going down. They all had decided that the trail was too treacherous further up. Not having seen these spots we continued on. This was turning into quite the adventure. We never saw the treacherous places the hikers had told us about, though. Maybe we have a different acceptance level for risks, but after 40 minutes of hike-a-bike the trail finally turned around and started following the contour of the landscape and conditions improved enough for us to ride.
The Timber Trail ends by Author’s Rock, and we had seen from below that the trail up to Arthur’s Rock was Foot Only, so we weren’t quite sure how we would get down to the valley floor again. We were counting on the Park Service not allowing biking on Timber Trail only to have them turn around at the top and and go back the very same trail.
It turns out that there is a new trail that starts out where Arthur’s Rock trail and Timber trail meet up. It is called Howard’s trail and it must be new. It is not on my apparently old trail map. Howard’s trail is a blast of a trail, though, with both sweet single track, and nice technical drops thrown in as it descends down towards the valley floor.
Our adventure up and around Timber trail had taken some time, and it was getting late in the afternoon. The sun was getting closer to the horizon, and the effect of the ride was starting to set in: A grumbling stomach and a strong urge to satisfy the hunger with a large plate of Mexican food, beer and a margarita. We obliged as soon as we got back to Boulder.
We wanted a long ride, and we got one. Combined between the Bobcat Ridge and the Lory State park ride we got more then 4,000 ft of climbing, almost 30 miles, and almost 6 hours of ride and some hike-a-bike in. It was a good day!
More photos here.