Home Soon...

The Aspen/Glenwood Springs area were a blast, as always. We're back on the Front Range, staying with our friends in Colorado Springs. We're leaving bright and early tomorrow morning and will stop in West Virginia to meet with family and friends before heading home.

Will post pictures when we get back to Alexandria!

Fruita

We mountain biked a few of the trails in Fruita, near Grand Junction. It was some of the best mountain biking we've done in a while. Gorgoeus views!

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We're leaving our friend's house today, headed up to Aspen and camping, so no new updates for awhile...

Colorado National Monument

This has been on Bob's do-list for at least 10 years: road bike the entire length of Colorado National Monument. This is sort of a mini-Zion, with incredible drop-offs, canyons, red rock formations and hoodoos. The first part is all uphill, about 2000 foot vertical in six miles or so. We did a 35 mile loop.

Here's the whole gang: Mike, Taz, Anna and Bob

The cliffs are huge, as you can see by how small Anna looks (click the pic to enlarge)...

There are many rock formations, such as this cool balancing rock.

Telluride

We've been wanting to go to Telluride for years, and we finally made it. What an awesome place!! The road into town just ends at those mountains you can see at the end of the street. There is a campground right in town, so you can walk or bike to stores, and the gondola is free for access to hiking, biking, bars etc.

We biked to Bear Creek Falls...

Here's the view from our campsite. The sun filtered through storm clouds right near sunset and lit up the mountains just so...

We hiked out of Lizard Head Pass one day. The aspen forest was lovely, and the wildflowers were the best we've seen so far. That big chunk of rock is the "lizard head".

Oh Be Joyful

Here's a glimpse of what we've been doing the past week or so.

Kenosha Pass

After leaving Denver we drove to Kenosha Pass at 10,000 feet. We didn't intend to stop here for any length of time, but we found the most awesome free campsite, and the mountain biking on the Colorado Trail through here was sweet!

We then headed toward Buena Vista, but again stopped short and camped at the Buffalo peaks area. Very beautiful and we had a private campsite with many many hummingbirds visiting us. So far we've camped at totally new places and are happy with our choices.

Campsite views

Our friends from Colorado Springs were going to be in Crested Butte, so we went there to meet them. We found a free campground next to the Slate River (again a new camping spot). We mountain biked at the ski area - a new experience lift served biking. There were several crashes, it was harder than expected, but everyone is fine if not scraped up.

Bob biking in Crested Butte

We hiked in the Oh-Be-Joyful area (perfect name) of the Raggeds Wilderness from our campsite, and have already put it on the list to come back to. We hiked to a cirque where we could see the other side of Scarp Ridge, which we hiked to last year. We also met some great people - Anne and her son Jesse - who live in Glenwood Springs. We hope to see them again there in a week or so.

Oh-Be-Joyful

Next up is Telluride...

Annual Tradition

Each year we come to Denver, we go out to dinner with Anna's bother, David, and his wife Ruth at La Fogata. They've got great margaritas and Mexican food. This year the Paulsen's joined us:

From L to R: Paige, Pam, Sydney, Chris, David, Ruth, Anna. Photographer: Bob.

Waterton Canyon

This ride follows along the south Platte River on a dirt road up to a dam. It's a lovely ride with lots to look at, rocks, water, canyons, birds. At the end of the road, we went up the Colorado Trail for the 5 mile single track loop we've heard about. It was a lot of uphill, with some lovely single track also.

Action shot of Chris:

Anna cruising through the wildflowers:

Waterton Canyon is home to Bighorn Sheep. We saw 17 of them on the ride down.

Colorado, finally!

We made it to Colorado on Thursday, one day behind schedule, just in time for a pretty good rain storm. It's been pleasantly cool the whole drive out here with temps in the 70's.

The rain finally stopped, the roads dried out and we went biking at Chatfield Resevoir. It looked like it was going to rain again, but it never did...

The next day we rode from Chris and Pam's house in Littleton to downtown Denver along the paved bike path that follows the south Platte River. It's about 15 miles one way, mostly flat, and goes through everything from an industrial park to manicured golf courses. It's a great ride, and just part of many, many miles of bike paths in south Denver. At the end is Confluence Park.

Kentucky

After leaving the Sprinter repair shop, we drove to Carter Caves, Kentucky. We camped here once about five years ago. Kentucky is full of caves, and this park has many, both tourist and wild. There are beautiful rocks all the over the place and on Tuesday before continuing our drive we did the "Natural Bridges" hike. Here are two of them:

From here we drove through Elizabethtown to Corydon, Indiana and got a hotel room.

We made it to...

... Hagerstown, MD before the van gave us some trouble. We left at 6am on Sunday morning, and by 8:00am the van was barely making it up the big hills on I-70 west of Frederick. We pulled off the road and called Bob's brother Tony, who looked up Sprinter repair places for us. Since it was Sunday everything was closed. So we drove to Greenbrier State Park a few miles away and set up camp. We napped, walked around and read our books. It was actually very relaxing!


The next day we drove the closest repair place which was in Waynesboro, PA (about 30 minutes away). Here's the van outside the repair shop. The turbo resonator was cracked, which is why we had no power uphill. It was under warranty and we were on our way by 12:30.