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Today's Stats
Miles:82.45
Riding Time: 4:43:28
Avg. Speed: 17.4
Max Speed: 43.6
Elevation Gain: 3120
Today was our drama day!
Morning temperature was 30 degrees. Cold, but no complaining as the heat will come soon enough! The rain chased us most of the day. When we stopped for a break the rain would soon find us and we then had to ride on to get away from it; at least in the morning.
At Copper Mountain we encountered about 300 runners using the trail for an organized 10K and half marathon. Five minutes faster and we would have passed them at the starting line.
The descent off of Vail Pass was fast and required sharp bike handling skills because there was a trail clean up crew picking up trash and many of them insisted on standing on the trail or crossing the trail without looking for any bikers. In their defense, who would be nuts enough to ride Vail Pass on a cold wet morning like we had today!
After Vail we had sunny and windy weather for about 40 miles. We stripped off the cold weather clothing and enjoyed the downhill in a hurricane. Well maybe not a hurricane, but a strong tailwind nonetheless.
With storm clouds rolling in we decided to stop by the Eagle airport and have lunch hoping the appproaching rain would blow over. Two hours later it was still raining so we put the cold weather clothing back on and got back on the bikes. After an hour riding in the rain and this time headwind, we got to Glenwood Canyon and discovered that the bike trail through the canyon was closed due to high water on the Colorado River. Riding on the interstate through the narrow canyon is against the law and very dangerous so we packed all the bikes in/on the car (all four of them as Bekkey brought two bikes and she is not even going to Phoenix!) and drove the the last 16 miles to Glenwood Springs. We wrung out our clothes and turned on the heater. For the rest of the trip we will long for a cold day, I'm sure.
Sorry, no pictures today. We are experiencing difficutly uploading images. Hope it is the network at the hotel and not something wrong with the computer.
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