national park, roadtrip, travel, USA

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

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Another one of those National Parks that I didn’t know existed until a few days ago was our objective for the day.  That was, after I finished the wonderful Agatha Christie novel The Secret of Chimneys (Kindles are great for traveling).  The Black Canyon was about ninety minutes’ drive SE of Grand Junction & we were pleased to leave behind the rain & see it dry out a bit.  From the town of Montrose, you drive up to about 2400m & after entering the park on top of what is not a particularly wide hill, there is all of a sudden a very deep but skinny canyon off the side of the road.

The canyon has the best combination of deepness, steepness & narrowness in the continent & it really is quite impressive. Carved out of hard rock by the fast-flowing Gunnison River (which flows on to the Colorado at Grand Junction), the canyon floor loses more elevation in forty-eight miles than the Mississippi does in its entire length (1550 miles). I thought we’d skip the Visitor Center to start with to make the most of the break in the weather. I was wrong, within ten minutes we were being snowed on heavily.

Consequently, we went back to the Visitor Center & had a quick look around & waited for the weather to clear. For the next hour or so, we drove around the South Rim dodging the snow, & then rain, taking in various vantage points. Besides the spectacular canyon, the highlight was seeing my first bobcat skulking off in to the bushes a few metres away from the trail. We got a better view of it a few minutes later as we were driving down the road – they are smaller than I, for some reason, thought. Unfortunately, no photo. Here are few more pictures of different parts of the canyon for those interested. While the clouds & rain can get a bit annoying at times, they do add a bit of a different atmosphere to the scenery.

These stripes in the rock were neat – formed by molten lava infiltrating cracks in the rock that was already there many moons ago.

Now I’m going back to a Poirot – the first in a while.

bikes, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

A Proper Fruita Ride

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Woken well too early & really struggling to get back to sleep, there was a bit of a sleep-in until eight. Poking my head out of the window eventually, there were less dark clouds hanging around than yesterday morning. With quick organisation, I was off out the door by myself (nice to have a bit of independence back & go off for a ride solo) & back at the Kokopelli trail head & riding by 9.15. With a bit of prior research, it looked like Mary’s Loop, Horsethief Bench & Moore Fun trails were the ones to string together for a good introduction to the trails proper. More showers & then thunderstorms were forecast so I was keeping one eye on the trails & scenery & the other on the large black clouds gathering ominously over the river.

Mary’s Loop started off with a nice climb up on to the bluffs above the river. It wasn’t a particularly difficult climb – in fact this was quite good, as this was to be my longest ride of the season so far. In spite of the gloom the views aren’t for scoffing at.

After riding the bluff for a while, Horsethief Bench loop cuts off down to the left – that’s it down there.

The route down (dropping 25m in a hurry) was rideable to start with & then the rocks just got too big for me.

Yes, there’s a trail down there; no, I couldn’t ride it all.

This side loop was OK & there were enough rocks to make things interesting & technically challenging in a few places. In some of the shadier parts, the sand was still a little wet from yesterday’s rain. I was pleased with some of the trickier step-ups & -downs I was able to clear.

While I remember, I’m going to digress to comment on my switch to tubeless. I went for a standard Stan’s setup a month or two ago. I had a few problems getting the rear standard Maxxis Crossmark to seal, but mainly because I was trying to do it with a floor pump (it’s a lot easier to get the bead to seat with a compressor). The front UST Kenda Nevegal went on easily with just a floor pump. Now that the tires are reliably inflated, I’m loving them. On all these rocks I’ve been running a much lower pressure that tubes would allow. In the last few days there have been five or six incidences where I’ve hit rocks that I’m sure would have given a tube a snakebite puncture. Actually, after my first rocky ride at Tabeguache I went to inflate my tires a bit & found they were running at 18 psi!

After the Horsebench, unfortunately I had to go back up all those rocks – nothing like a bit of hike-a-bike – to get back on to Mary’s Loop to ride around the bluffs once more on more double-track. All the while, the clouds were getting closer but I still wasn’t wet.

Eventually the trail turned away from the river & climbed up for a while to the start of Moore Fun. This was the option to get back to the car with the most singletrack & least road, so it was a no-brainer to take it. It turned out it was a double black, the first part was where a fair chunk of my six hundred metres of climbing for the day came from. Finally there was a decent amount of singletrack (as opposed to wide double-track), & it was rocky – there were plenty of bits where I had to walk. The rain had started by now (I’d got off remarkably well so far) & any dirt/sand quickly turned to awful mud that just stuck to everything. The views of the big black cloud were pretty good from the top.

The trail marking on the way down left a bit to be desired & I had a map & a GPS to follow (marking at intersections was great, but on the rocks in the wet it was sometimes hard to find the trail)! But I made it down off the ridge & in to more of that nasty sticky stuff. I made it back to the car (2.40 & about 23km) & was disappointed to see that there was no hose at the trailhead – it seems a bit odd (Have you got a hose? I need to get wet asep), considering how poorly the trails stand up to just a little bit of rain.

Great to get out for a decent ride & I didn’t get too wet. Perhaps it because was I missed out on the views in the sun, but I can’t quite see what all the fuss is about at Fruita – I’ve ridden much better trails with better views all around the place. None of the trails seemed to flow particularly well & quite a bit of the ride was spent on relatively tame double-track. Maybe I’ll find something more interesting on Saturday (when we also mean to check out the Mike the Headless Chicken festival as the story behind it is interesting).

We had a great Nepalese meal downtown Grand Junction this evening – I even managed to remember my huge Nepalese vocabulary of four words & it brought back many great memories, I must get back to Nepal one day. Best statues of the day are Chrome on the Range II:

and a single-speeding dinosaur.

bikes, family, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Tastes – first Fruita ride & many fruit wines

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There weren’t quite enough clouds to dissuade me from dragging us fifteen miles down the freeway to Fruita to check out the Kokopelli trails this morning.  However, there were enough to get us significantly wet after an hour.  The plan was for me to take Valerie around the beginner Rustler Loop & then go off & attack some of the more well-known trails.  The loop started off with a nice long (for a beginner trail) climb & then proceeded to go around the outside the top of a small mesa above the Colorado.  Near the trailhead was a bit of private land – these people have their house in the side of a big rock!

The trail was mostly nice, but there were some interesting switchback & short sharp rises that induced a bit of walking on Valerie’s part. There some quite tricky little features in the rocks that had me thinking too, but at least I managed to clear the whole trail – that would have been a dent to my confidence, not making it around a beginners’ trail. Posted around the trail were lots of little signs with riding tips – I stopped to read these while waiting, I also looked at the river a lot & pondered just how close & dark the clouds were getting. Half way around it started drizzling & slowly the rain set in – we made it back to the car quite wet. I deliberated for sometime & then decided to come back another day soon when it wasn’t so wet & the trails wouldn’t be that awful red mud.

I’m not sure Valerie appreciates that she is mountain-biking in Fruita, Colorado & the significance of that!

The original idea with the Palisade wineries was to bike between them in the sun one afternoon, lack of sunshine meant we went for the driving option. The area, as well as having many vineyards, is also a very strong fruit growing area. Consequently, many of the wines we tasted were fruit flavoured – they were great. Being mid-week before the summer break it was pretty quiet & we spent a good few hours chatting aimlessly with friendly Coloradans over many small glasses of wine & mead. It was the most time we’ve tracked out the “she’s my aunt from Australia, I’m from New Zealand & have just finished living in Canada near Banff for a year & we’re doing a three-month roadtrip” story in a row. It was a delightful afternoon – somehow Valerie couldn’t resist six bottles of wine, I’m not too sure how they are going to survive the back of the car with two bikes (“,the greyhounds…”). I resisted the wine, but not getting Kristy another fridge magnet – wine-touring in France is starting to sound like a good idea.

I may have mentioned before that quite a few of the towns we’ve been through have many statues & sculptures lining their main streets – Grand Junction has plenty. The much smaller Palisade has this beauty, from a distance it just looked like a lot of fire plugs (incidentally many of the plugs around GJ are not red but blue & yellow or green & yellow) on a stand.

Appropriately named Rusty was made entirely of bolts

bikes, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

The start of a Grand Junction week

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Boring, but necessary, things were done yesterday morning – I changed the oil & filter (it’s amazing how fast 5000 km comes around on a roadtrip in this big country), grocery shopping, first visit to REI for the trip & so on.

So I was ultra-pleased with the opportunity for a good ride in the afternoon.  Perfect riding conditions showed up too – overcast. warm but with a nice breeze to prevent overheating.  Just north of town across the Colorado are the Lunch Loop trails set in some nice little canyons.  For an early Monday afternoon, there were an awful lot of cars in the parking lot – they must be good trails.  I’m nowhere near bike-fit yet (damn long winter) so the steep climbing up the canyon (at one point I think I was going up a gnarly down trail) was punctuated by a few photo stops.  I love these canyons in this part of the world, they’re gorgeous.  Good overcast riding weather is not great photography weather, but my photos are never world-class so it hardly matters!

My legs survived OK, but I’ll be pleased to get a bit of cardio back. But it was soon time to turn & go down. The trails were flowy for a while & then headed in to some really big rocks that meant I found it difficult to negotiate some of the step-ups – maybe the biggest part of being off the bike for so long isn’t the fitness, it’s the loss of technique & confidence to attempt some of more tricky technical bits. Despite that, I had an absolute blast as I wound my was down & in & out of sub-canyons.

I met Valerie back at the car, she having returned from walking some of the trails closer to the parking lot, & we continued up the road to Colorado National Monument. This was another one of those places we’d never heard of the day prior, but all the literature for GJ accommodation & the first waitress we had in town gushed about it. A big rock above towering above Grand Junction it is over 20,000 acres worth of monument with many spectacular canyons carved into it. It was a great scenic drive of about twenty miles punctuated by many stops as we looked over the precipices (of great peril) as the sun came out.

These are appropriately called the Coke Ovens

We’ve decided to extend our time here in Grand Junction up to a week as it’s a nice place, but the weather forecast means I’ll struggle to fit all the rides in I want to if we left on Thursday. So Moab has been pushed out until Sunday, I’m sure I’ll survive. Today we checked out the local museum while it drizzled – the history of the local nomadic tribes & the roaming Spanish in the 1700s was fascinating. With just a few scattered showeres this afternoon & a bit of sun we enjoyed a leisurely ride along the Colorado River Trail – with lots of birdlife (& a couple of deer & many burrowing rodents of some description) to keep us amused.

Biking to go places, going places to bike.