Ride the Rockies (June 2005)

Saturday: We arrive in Grand Junction – where this year’s Ride the Rockies begins – in mid-afternoon, and it’s hot. Just plain hot. The weather is more suited for a swim in the Colorado River rather than for a bike ride. Mick grabs a spot for our camping gear that is under one of the few shade trees on the school lawn. Without this little bit of shade, it would be brutal.

After picking up our registration stuff, we head out to find some dinner. You would think that in a town the size of Grand Junction that there would be a nice organized dinner of some sort, but it’s not to be. The downtown restaurants are jammed, and it seems to take forever just to get a few slices of pizza. At the table next to us is a group of white haired guys with big guts. We chat with them for a bit – they are very nice, but don’t look at all like cyclists. In fact, there seem to be really obese people everywhere we turn. This is not an auspicious start to Ride the Rockies.

Sunday: Some guys camping near us are up and talking – loudly – early, and no matter how hard I try to ignore them and finish my sleeping, it’s no good. This should be a fun day to sleep in, since we actually stay in Grand Junction two nights in a row and don’t have to pull down the tent this morning. So we get up far too early, and have a pancake breakfast hosted by some local group only a short distance away at the front entrance to the school. But there’s nowhere to sit. What are these people thinking?

Today’s ride is a loop through the Colorado National Monument, somewhere I’ve never been before. I’ve heard that it’s beautiful; in fact, once – years ago – I signed up for a running race that’s held over the monument every November – but a blizzard stopped me from making the drive across the state for the race. So I’m looking forward to finally seeing what all the fuss is about.

This is my fourth Ride the Rockies (RTR), and it’s the first time we’ve ever made it to the opening ceremonies. But today’s ride is relatively short, so we take the time to walk over and listen to a number of people give speeches: the director of RTR, the mayor of Grand Junction, and finally, the head of the state patrollers who will accompany us on their motorcycles as we cycle around the state. Just as the state patroller is ready to send us on our way, a tire explodes, and everyone ducks like a bomb has just been tossed in our midst. Already, this seems like a fitting start to the week.

It doesn’t take long to fall into a nice cadence as we roll out of Grand Junction, heading west. When we reach the start of the climb over the monument – it’s pretty much a long grind to the top and then a free ride down the other side – Mick takes off. He climbs much faster than me, so this is typical, and it’s the pattern we have developed over time. Occasionally during the week, he will ride with me at my slower pace, but for now, he needs to strut his stuff up the mountain, so I say goodbye as he wheels away.

This is fine, except in no time at all some woman falls in riding behind me, half-wheeling – drafting way too close, with her front wheel overlapping my rear wheel. It’s very annoying, and it feels dangerous. I’m cranking along at a pretty good clip, though, so I try to ignore her. I try to drop her, but she just hangs on, and every once in a while, she’ll pass me. But then, without the benefit of the draft, she slows down so much that I end up passing her back, and the next thing I know, she’s right there behind me, half-wheeling again. She’s a small woman, but she has disproportionately wide hips. For some insane reason, this irritates me even more.

Eventually, I lose the woman with wide hips. I ride around a couple of women who are struggling up the hill, and I hear them say, “she’s so tiny”. I figure they are talking about somebody else, since nobody has ever called me tiny, but then the other woman responds, “yeah, look at her legs – I bet she’s a runner”, and I wonder. Are they describing me? And so I preen a bit as I crank along.

But then a couple on a tandem bike floats around me on this uphill, and takes me by surprise. Now, one of the well known facts about tandems is that they will always pass you going downhill – with the weight of two people, they just fly down the hill. But it doesn’t feel so bad to be passed on the downhills since you know you can always pass them again going uphill. So this is a particularly humbling moment. But none of it really matters, and so I say in mock horror, “the shame, the shame”, and everyone around me laughs.

The scenery is spectacular. Red rock formations, more like Utah than Colorado, all around. It’s stunning. It’s grand. It’s highly distracting, and it takes all my discipline to keep my eyes and attention on the road. And it’s far too short. Before you know it, we’ve summited, and we are on our way back to Grand Junction.

Mick waits for me at one of the aid stations, and we ride the last part of the day’s ride together. We’re cranking along pretty fast, and he comments on my cadence and speed. It’s something I’ve been working on this spring, and I feel good that he’s noticed that I’ve picked up the pace. Mostly, I feel good just riding along, cruising along a road that’s now mostly flat. Not a bad first day of riding.

Monday: This will be our hardest day of the week, and so we’re awake at 4:30 a.m. and packed up and leaving Grand Junction by 7 a.m., after a repeat of Sunday’s pancake breakfast. What is it with these guys that they don’t understand that people need a place to sit while they eat?

When this year’s RTR schedule was published back in the winter, I naively told Mick that it didn’t really have any difficult rides. After Mick saw the schedule, he tried to impress upon me how hard today’s ride over Grand Mesa would be. But I’ve driven over Grand Mesa, and it never impressed me as steep. In fact, it didn’t impress me much at all. But today it will definitely leave an impression.

The route today takes us on a flat grade out of Grand Junction, and Mick comments on how I’m riding well on this terrain, and then he ventures into dangerous territory. “You ride well on the flats, but climbing is not your strong suit,” he says to me. What?!? I’m hurt. I’m offended. And I’m pissed. I never fully understand why he says this, but it sets me up for the day. I have something to prove now.

This route takes us along nice quiet back roads leaving Grand Junction, and we hop into a pace line with a just a few guys. Nelson Vails, a former pro cyclist (and Olympic silver medalist) who comes on RTR every year, is part of this group, and I’m pretty thrilled to be able to hang with them, even if for a short time. The terrain goes from flat to gently rolling, and I get dropped pretty quickly. Mick drops back to ride with me. The terrain rolls here, but we’ve clearly started what will be a gradual climb before starting our real ascent for the day.

The back roads spit us out onto I-70, and it’s the single most scary stretch of road that I’ve ever ridden. The interstate is not excessively wide here, and the truck traffic seems exceptionally heavy, and it seems that the shoulder is not at all wide enough. Normally on RTR we see motorcycle patrolmen frequently, especially on heavily traveled roads, but today we don’t see a single cop while we ride next to the freeway. It’s as close to terror that I’ll come anytime during this week, and so I’m ecstatic to get off the interstate and back onto our normal backroads.

As soon as we leave the freeway, the climb starts in earnest. Still fuming over Mick’s earlier remark, I’m motivated to ride like never before. Mick climbs away in front of me, but I haul ass, too. I’m out to prove something, at least to myself. I count the people I pass as we head up the first steep pitch for a mile or two. I pass 35 people, and only one person goes around me. Ha! So there! I find Mick at the aid station at the top of this stretch, and give him my count. He does not seem impressed. He tells me that we have lots more miles of climbing, and the unspoken message is, “don’t get so cocksure quite yet”.

And he’s right – what follows is one long, drawn out climb. Grand Mesa is a twenty-mile climb, averaging about a 5% grade, and that’s just a long time to be crawling up the hill. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t look steep at all, so it seems extremely cruel to have to work so hard to go so slow. It’s only when you turn and look behind you that you get a sense that the road is even on an incline.

But I keep count here, too, and proudly tell him, when we reach the summit all those miles later, that I’ve passed 380 people on the climb, and only 41 have passed me. And what’s more, I announce to him, I did not count the people getting into the sag wagons along the way. It’s really a case of just not having the mental capacity – far too many people abandon this ride for the buses and trucks today. It will turn out to be the single worst day for RTR in terms of the number of people who do not complete the ride because of its difficulty – a full one quarter of all riders will get to Delta on a bus rather than on their bikes. Mick is actually impressed with the numbers that I present to him. But by now, given how much I’ve suffered on this climb, I’m thinking that he just might have been right, and that I do need some work on my climbing skills.

The real rub is that there is almost no food left at the summit – all the folks in sag wagons having gotten there before us – and we’re already getting maxed out on the bananas, oranges, and clif bars that seem to make up many of the calories we consume during RTR. The ride downhill is still quite long, but the rush of hitting 41 mph makes up – at least in part – for the difficulty of the climb. We make up for our lack of food on the road with a good community dinner in Delta, Mexican food that is heaped on our plates in just the right abundance. That’s topped off with little plastic tubs of ice cream – complete with wooden spoons – for dessert. And it’s just slightly cooler here than in Grand Junction, so the sleeping is better.

Tuesday: Today is a short day, so we sleep in a bit, and enjoy a breakfast of – you guessed it – pancakes! Today’s ride is the shortest – and flattest – of the week, but the road is the roughest asphalt that we’ll encounter. We ride along easily together. Mick rides behind me for a short time – a rarity – and now he’s coaching again. “Get your heels down, this is not ballet!” he orders me. Yes, coach. I don’t even fight him on this one.

We ride backroads from Delta to Montrose – we’ve ridden this route before, a few years ago, but in the opposite direction – and it’s all ranchland. At one point we see a crowd gathered along the side of the road in front of us, and I think, uh-oh, has there been an accident? But as we wheel on by, we see what everyone is looking at: a foal has just been born in the field next to the road, and it is standing on wobbly legs for the first time.

It’s early when we set up our tent in Montrose, but because we were late leaving Delta, all the shady spots are gone. It’s hotter than Hades in Montrose, so we head off to the swimming pool to cool down a bit. We have an early dinner at a diner just down the road from the swimming pool, and by the time we get back to our tent, we’re ready for sleep.

Wednesday: Breakfast is………pancakes! Ta-da! What a surprise! But we have a challenging day of riding ahead, so we chow down once again.

The winds on the road from Montrose to Gunnison – today’s ride – are such that the RTR organizers always recommend a late start. If you leave early, the headwinds on Cerro Summit are just brutal. They’re still quite intense even if you leave a little later – say, at 9 a.m. – but just not quite as intense.

So we take our time packing up and getting on the road. Once we hit the climb, with the headwinds, Mick does me the favor of riding at a pace so that I can draft off him. Everyone is suffering. But I’m suffering a bit less because of my gallant knight just a few inches in front of me.

The reward, of course, is that the descent on the other side of the Cerro pass is a great one. No switchbacks, but nice grand wide turns, so that you can take advantage of the downhill and really cut loose. And just as we hit the start of the descent…….disaster! There is road construction that should have been done by the time we pass through, but our spring weather screwed up that schedule, and the road is a mess. To try to compensate for the long unpaved section, some Einstein of a road engineer decided that we would all benefit from a layer of tar. Yes, tar. We are forced to ride on a bed of dirt that has just been sprayed with tar, and it’s a nightmare. There is tar everywhere, and it’s a very unstable surface, and I’m afraid of going down at any moment. This path of terror goes on for far too many miles, and when we finally hit pavement again, we’re at an aid station.

I’ve lost Mick in the descent, but find him again at the aid station. This is fortuitous, since there are about a million people at this aid station, and everyone has the same mission: to clean their bikes as much as possible. I’m hopping mad, since I just got new tires before this ride, and now they are completely mucked up with tar. But everyone else is in the same boat, and it’s a mob scene with people scrounging whatever cleaning supplies that they can from the support trucks.

The tar puts a pallor on the day that is soon matched by approaching clouds. Compared to the 2004 RTR where it rained every day, it has been a drought this year. We’ve been careful not to complain too much about the heat, but today our grumblings catch up to us, and we hit thunder and lightning and rain on the way in to Gunnison. Happily, we outrun much of it, and we reach Gunnison without any more terrible stretches of road. I’ve scheduled a post-ride massage today, and that – along with the heaping plate of pasta at the dinner in the park – puts me in a much better frame of mind. We climb into the tent with a lightning show going on all around.

Thursday: Dinner in Gunnison is always wonderful – this is, after all, the third year that I’ve spent in Gunnison in four consecutive years of RTR – but breakfast, alas, sucks. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of paying five and a half bucks for a cold breakfast burrito with some kind of mystery ingredients and cold yogurt, after camping in the cold of high altitude. So even before I overdosed on pancakes along this trek, I knew that Gunnison would not be a good breakfast morning. But we make do – I get a cup of joe from the coffee guy, and down that while eating a breakfast bar and a banana that I’ve scrounged from yesterday’s aid station leftovers.

It’s sprinkling a bit as we ride out of Gunnison, but it’s beautiful country and nice, easy riding. We spend a long time at the first aid station, taking off extraneous clothes now that the sun is out and it’s warming up. I scrounge up more food – a true, hot breakfast taco from one of the vendors who shows up each day, along with a cookie for dessert, even though it’s barely mid-morning. We keep seeing guys along the route who have that pregnant-belly look, and today they seem to be out in droves. I wonder if, with this diet, I’ll soon start to look like them.

At the second aid station, which is right before the start of the climb up Monarch Pass, I finally get one of Katie’s cookies – my first of this RTR. Katie is a woman who shows up at RTR every year with near Frisbee-sized cookies for sale out of the back of her van. She is a bit of a cross between a hippie and a flirt, and she always wears long granny skirts and spaghetti-strap tops, and has no trouble selling her cookies for two bucks a shot to the guys. Trouble is, her cookies are phenomenal, packed with all kinds of simple stuff that makes them taste great. Mick and I usually share one each day, but this week we haven’t seen Katie until today. Mick claims to be in cookie overload, so I get an entire Frisbee to myself. Given the climb that’s coming up, it seems like a sensible approach to fuel.

Mick and I climb Monarch Pass at our own speeds, and he’s soon left me in his wake. This is the first major climb since Grand Mesa, and I fall back into a habit of counting people along the way. I’m pleased that even though I’m not quite so pissed off and not purposely racing up the hill today, I’m still passing lots more people than pass me.

One of the women I pass near the top of the pass is Chandra, and I shout out to her as I ride by. Mick and I met Chandra last year on a training ride from Boulder to Ward (a great but difficult ride), and then saw her several times during the 2004 Ride the Rockies. Chandra is a young woman who loves to ride, but her boyfriend - although a very accomplished runner – is not much of a cyclist at all. So this is her second year of doing RTR solo, and I have great respect for her for getting out here. And today, I’m totally ecstatic that I’m passing her near the top of Monarch Pass. You see, last year, on the penultimate day of RTR, Mick and I stopped to chat with her while gathering up our camping gear. Chandra was waiting for her boyfriend, who was driving up from Boulder to spend the night with her, and she told us that she had told him about me. To Mick and me, she said, “yes, I told him that for an older lady, you are in incredible shape.” Mick and I have had great fun with that remark over the course of the year, and today as I dust her on this difficult climb, I try to think of something appropriate to say. In my mind, I play with phrases like “so how does it feel to have your young tail whipped by an older lady?” but it’s too late. She’s history. And I’m on my way down the other side of the pass.

Mick and I are early to arrive in Salida today, so we get a choice camping spot, and head into town for a very early dinner. Despite all the food we ate along the way early in the day, we’ve really not had a proper meal yet, so lunch/dinner at 4 p.m. it is. It feels incredibly good to sit down inside a restaurant for this meal. Afterwards, we find our way to a local post office, and priority mail a bunch of stuff we’ve acquired throughout the week – souvenir shirts, photos, the like – to my home. It feels great to not have to worry about this stuff anymore, but it also reminds us that we will be back home in Denver in only a couple more days.

Later we take the bus back into town and pay our five bucks apiece to watch an amateur film called “The Tour de France Baby”, and have a grand time, despite our growing disappointment over the fact that we’re not going back to the Tour again this year. This will have to be our Tour in absentia. We celebrate with an ice cream cone while we walk back to our tent.

Friday: Only one phrase can describe today’s ride: it sucks.

Salida puts on a great breakfast of – can you guess – pancakes – so we chow down, and head out down the road. The weather is decent, and the riding is good to the first aid station. But after aid station number one, the road becomes newly laid chip-seal, and it’s a miserably bumpy ride. At the third aid station, the wind whips up and the clouds are scudding across the sky, and we decide to make a run for it, but the rain catches us out on the road. It’s a slow grinding climb to Leadville from here. We’ve ridden this route before, but I can’t remember it being this terrible. For the first time all week – just before the rain hits – I drop my chain along the road, and it’s just one more thing to deal with. Luckily for me, a Mavic wheel car is passing me just as I get the chain back on, and they stop to offer me a shop rag to clean the grease off my hands. Unfortunately, this turns out to be the high point of the day.

Since Mick and I started doing Ride the Rockies together, he has always told me that the coldest and most miserable camping in the state is in Leadville. When we signed up for RTR this year, we talked about getting a room in a hotel or B&B for our Leadville night, but we just never got around to it. When we get to the high school in Leadville, it looks grim, and I sorely regret our procrastination. It’s been raining here, and our gear is all covered in mud and grit. Lucky for us, we’ve learned to rainproof our bags, so the damage is not bad. But the camping pickings are slim, and even worse indoors. Finally, we settle on a small patch of grass in the tiny but flat area at the entrance to the school. This will be about the single most felicitous decision of our trip.

We take the bus into town and have a crummy dinner at a crowded restaurant in downtown Leadville, but we’re just happy to be inside, warm, and dry. The bus picks us up again to go back to the school, and the weather is getting dicey again. Moments before the bus pulls up to the school, an utter downpour begins, and we have no choice but to run for it. The rain does not let up. We make our way to the tent, panting with the effort of sprinting uphill for a quarter of a mile in driving rain. We pray that our camping spot will not flood. And we pray that the tent is waterproof. We fall asleep with the rain still pounding outside.

Saturday: We wake up to the morning noises of early risers on RTR. Happily, our tent is dry inside. The sun is very weak in the eastern sky right now, and there is a light layer of frost on everything outside. I’m extremely happy that this is the last time we have to break camp.

Breakfast today is supposed to be a feast including oatmeal and French toast and bagels and fruit. But the sponsor is the local volunteer fire department, and shortly before we reach the head of the line, they are called out on a fire call. So we consider ourselves lucky to each score half a bagel along with a skimpy bowl of oatmeal. Still, we linger inside the school when it seems that everyone else has already taken off for the day. It’s damn cold out there.

The sun is finally starting to shine a bit as we skirt Leadville, but it is extremely cold; there is frost in the shadows along the road we take on our way around Leadville. We go downhill a bit at first – miserably cold! – but then have a nice little climb to get around town. Heading out of Leadville on the east side, it’s cold once again on a downhill stretch, but after a quick stop at an aid station, we start the climb over Fremont Pass. It’s good to work up a sweat climbing, and the climb seems shorter and flatter than I remember it from the last time we rode this stretch of highway.

The downhill from the top of Fremont Pass all the way to Frisco is a dream. Flying. It’s turning into a warm day, and the sun is out, and the road is perfect. There’s one last aid station in Frisco, and there are a couple of young sisters selling fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies here. Mmmm. The last stretch of road is a little downhill before a very gradual uphill grade into Breckenridge, and our ride is done. One last turn, and we’re riding under the “Finish” sign for the 2005 Ride the Rockies.

As always, we see Chandra at the finish, and we have a photo taken together. We go to the closing ceremonies, and groan when we don’t win any of the door prizes – groaning especially loudly when we don’t win the coveted bike giveaway. We fill out the evaluations and state our complaints about the various things along the way that have annoyed us: too many pancakes, the stretch of tar, the food along the way. But we spend more time writing about the things that were great: the riding, the views along the way, the fantastic volunteers, the near omnipresent motorcycle cops who keep us safe, the fun at the riding seminars, the food along the way.

And we always – always – check the box that says we’ll be back again next year.