Riding to Vail

You can read the summary from last time. Subtract the rain, substitute a constant headwind, and that was just about that. I don't remember it being so dark at 5:45 last year when I got ready to leave. I delayed my start a few minutes to let it get a little lighter out and to eat a biscuit that just came out of the oven. Pretty much as soon as I got across Santa Fe and onto Florida, the wind was in my face. It stayed there up the I-70 frontage road past lookout, took a brief break on parts of Squaw Pass, but didn't let up all the way to the Vail Plaza Hotel. The adventure was again about eight hours of ride time and the scenery was lovely as ever.

I headed out Sunday morning for a quick spin up Battle Mountain, just to shake up the legs a little more before getting a massage and jumping in the car to come home. My legs were trashed! I have no doubt that the effort was harder than last year, hopefully the extra effort pays off in a couple weeks time. One of the coolest sights as you climb from Minturn towards Leadville, is the abandoned town of Gilman, CO. It was a mining town until the late 1970s when the mine was shut down and soon after that it was all (mine, town, pile of tailings, etc.) declared a Superfund site by the EPA. I didn't do any exploring of my own, but the linked pictures are pretty cool. The weekend was pretty quiet other than that . . .