Decomposed granite trails, wildflowers blooming, and a few patches of snow to remind us that winter was here but finally is releasing itself from the Front Range.
I met AV Boy for the drive up to BC where we hooked up with Avion Nomad and I had grand visions of distances to Chair Rocks and back and a Sandy Wash finish. My plans didn't roll quite the way I had hoped but we still knocked out a sweet little 25 mile loop with over 2500 ft of climbing.
We climbed up Shinglemill to 543 where the guys were talking about just riding the fireroad to the Colorado Trail on the east side of Deckers Road. There was patchy snowpack above us, where the evergreen forest begins and another section of the Colorado Trail lies. Both AV Boy and Avion were convinced the trail would be under snow but with my constant badgering they relented and agreed to go check it out.
By this point I had been sucking wind. My legs had felt sluggish and every breath had felt shallow, as though I couldn't pull in enough air. As soon as we hit the forested section of the Colorado Trail though, Avion must of felt the change in me because he let me take point and I went into zoom~zoom mode.
Ducking and weaving we hit a few sections of snow but it was completely ridable, frozen into its granular shape enough to give traction.
We dodged the road again , ducking onto the Buffalo Burn Trail and finally made our way east of Deckers Road to the Colorado Trail heading to Chair Rocks. This area of the Colorado Trail is an open rolling hills area, that had at one time been a forest but after a 12,000 acre forest fire in 1994 that is said to burn as hot as 9 atomic bomb blasts, the land will only support scragg and small brush.
Looking back over those hills and seeing that Avion and I had dropped AV Boy(who was the only one riding singlespeed) by a considerable distance I decided to turn us around. The original plan had been to drop Shinglemill and climb up Baldy and drop Sandy wash but Avion decided to call it a night and seeing was 9:30 and I still had an hour drive home, I decided to do the same.
Buffalo Creek is calling, where are you gonna be this weekend?
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