bike trip is a go!
Jun. 1st, 2020 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ilanaramaAs I mentioned earlier this year, we signed up for the San Juan Huts ride again this year - we did it in 2016 - but with all manner of things being canceled due to the pandemic, we were unsure whether it would actually happen. Well, we were notified last week that they will be allowing trips to go! There are a few extra safeguards (in particular, we have to carry our own sleeping bags rather than using the ones at the huts, and apparently there will be new cleaning/disinfecting protocols) but it's happening, hooray!
Fortunately we (and our friends who we invited along - we have three others going for sure, and possibly 1-2 more) have been doing our best to get in shape, because it's a challenging ride. I have definitely felt lucky to be living in rural-ish Colorado rather than in a city during the pandemic restrictions, so we've been able to run, hike, and bike; our friends in Barcelona, for example, were only allowed out of their apartment to go grocery shopping until quite recently. My strategy over the past several months has been to run 5x/week (30-35mpw with one track workout) and bike twice a week (one 8-12 mile lunch ride on a weekday, and one 22-32 mile ride with a lot of vertical on a weekend).
So mostly we've been preparing by riding up steep mountain dirt/4x4 roads. This is still early season, so our turnarounds are often determined by "oops, too much snow to keep going!" For example, yesterday:
We (Britt and I, and our friends Rolfe and Kristen, who are going on the hut trip with us) rode up a nearby canyon from about 8100' to 10,700', at which point we hit...this. If you can't tell, it's a deep, swift, relatively long stream crossing, followed by a snowbank. We dithered about trying to continue (and by 'we' I mean mostly Rolfe; the rest of us were, "yeah, time to turn back") until some hikers came by, heading to their vehicle which was parked at this corner (out of the picture to the left) who told us that things got pretty well snowpacked around the next switchback. (And as is not unusual around here, we knew one of them!) So that was a sign to head back down, hurray.
A few other photos from our recent rides:
We kept going through this next snowbank, but didn't make it a lot farther.
A different jeep road, a week later - we turned around here!
No snow on this ride! We started from our house, got to a very steep dirt road, took it to a closed jeep road (bike and hike trail only), and up to a summit, and then rode down a singletrack to connect to another steep road back down.
This one was on a closed Forest Service road, so no traffic, yay! Beautiful day, relatively easy grade until near the end, a nice long ride with gorgeous high mountain scenery.
Our hut trip starts on Saturday, June 20th - that gives us only another three weeks (and another two weekends) to get in shape. Hopefully we will be ready!
Fortunately we (and our friends who we invited along - we have three others going for sure, and possibly 1-2 more) have been doing our best to get in shape, because it's a challenging ride. I have definitely felt lucky to be living in rural-ish Colorado rather than in a city during the pandemic restrictions, so we've been able to run, hike, and bike; our friends in Barcelona, for example, were only allowed out of their apartment to go grocery shopping until quite recently. My strategy over the past several months has been to run 5x/week (30-35mpw with one track workout) and bike twice a week (one 8-12 mile lunch ride on a weekday, and one 22-32 mile ride with a lot of vertical on a weekend).
So mostly we've been preparing by riding up steep mountain dirt/4x4 roads. This is still early season, so our turnarounds are often determined by "oops, too much snow to keep going!" For example, yesterday:
We (Britt and I, and our friends Rolfe and Kristen, who are going on the hut trip with us) rode up a nearby canyon from about 8100' to 10,700', at which point we hit...this. If you can't tell, it's a deep, swift, relatively long stream crossing, followed by a snowbank. We dithered about trying to continue (and by 'we' I mean mostly Rolfe; the rest of us were, "yeah, time to turn back") until some hikers came by, heading to their vehicle which was parked at this corner (out of the picture to the left) who told us that things got pretty well snowpacked around the next switchback. (And as is not unusual around here, we knew one of them!) So that was a sign to head back down, hurray.
A few other photos from our recent rides:
We kept going through this next snowbank, but didn't make it a lot farther.
A different jeep road, a week later - we turned around here!
No snow on this ride! We started from our house, got to a very steep dirt road, took it to a closed jeep road (bike and hike trail only), and up to a summit, and then rode down a singletrack to connect to another steep road back down.
This one was on a closed Forest Service road, so no traffic, yay! Beautiful day, relatively easy grade until near the end, a nice long ride with gorgeous high mountain scenery.
Our hut trip starts on Saturday, June 20th - that gives us only another three weeks (and another two weekends) to get in shape. Hopefully we will be ready!