A 2gu Ride
So, Saturday afternoon I headed out for a fun ride… I started up Rocky Canyon at 2:18 and made it to Aldape summit by 3:36 (~8 miles w/1900 ft assent)… not too bad, but not too good. Conditions were decent, not much deep or slushy snow, some ice and lots of hardpack snow on the road. There was a little mud in spots where the sun hit the road. This was where I ate my first gu.
There had been a reasonable amount of traffic so I wasn’t freaked out by cougars yet (yes they are around and I know people who have seen them, no attacks yet though). I kept going up ridge road. Here the going got a lot tougher than me and I had to stop and rest periodically. Eventually, ridge road turned into a snowmobile / 4 wheeler road (based on the tracks). I keep riding, but the climbing was really tough as the snow got softer up around 6000 feet. But it wasn’t that far (few miles) over to 8th street where I could ride back to town.
It took a long time to make those few miles and finally I started dropping back down towards 8th street. When I reached the upper gate (it gets closed to cars in the winter time) I was amused to see the gate was almost under the snow that I was riding on. I stopped took some pictures with my phone (which didn’t turn out all the good).
There were also lots of animal tracks on the trails, some I’m sure were dogs from people hiking, some were probably coyotes, some may have been big kitties. I have since read up on how to differentiate cougar tracks from dog tracks, not that it would do me a lot of good to know I was on a cougar trail or not.
I rode down a little further and started getting cold… (I’d burnt too much energy with out consuming enough food). So I stopped and put on some extra layers and broke out the hand warmers. Sarah called at this point to see where I was, when I finished I thought “hmmm, it’s going to be dark soon…” and looked to see where the sun was, it was just going below the horizon at that moment, it was really pretty, smog in the valley, snow on the hills and the sun setting over the Owyees.
Anyway onward and downward, finally after about 4 or 5 miles of downhill I saw some cars with people. I hadn’t seen any life since Aldape summit. When I got back into the north end of Boise I needed to put my lights on to play in traffic (’cause it was dark and the law says so). Unfortunately, my hands were too cold to be able to handle the lights… So I had to stand on the corner for a while to get my hands warmed up enough to put my lights on… All went as planned and I was back at my truck 4.5 hours, 23.5 hours, and ~3200 feet of climbing later.