We had originally planned to explore Heil Valley Ranch and
we were unaware, until we arrived, that the trail had been impacted by the
Lyons flood. We found another trail that
looked similar in South Boulder- Betasso Pass.
We arrived, mapped our trip, and headed out with our camelbaks and
snacks.
The ride started out slow since this was our first mountain
bike ride on our newly (self) built bikes.
For me, it had been at least a decade (man do I feel old now) since I
had even sat on a mountain bike let alone feel the bumpy ground beneath my
tires. My first fall was more of me
tipping over as I stopped to let a runner by on the very narrow trail. The second spill was the exact opposite. I tipped over the handlebars, getting my legs
caught between the components of the bike which left a nice indent on my shin. I’m sure there were a few extra crashes
between that one and the last, where I managed to fall in the only stream there
was on the whole trail. This was the
point where I wanted to call it quits and turn around- only one mile into our
ride. I worked up my motivation and
determined I would finish the 3 mile loop.
This was the point where Matt exclaimed, “OMG- look at your shin!” and
began laughing at its novelty size. The
location where the divot used to be in my shin was now golf ball sized and didn’t
hurt until I looked at it. Great.
Matt went ahead to see if the trail condition was any
better- less rocky outcroppings maybe?
After he came back we decided to keep going to the end of our loop since
it couldn’t get any worse- and I believe the trail was meant to be a one-way
loop for cyclists. The last section of
our journey was, lucky for me, less eventful than the first mile and we made it
back to the car without any blood loss.
The last two miles of the ride were actually fun after I got
the hang of riding up hill on loose rocks.
There weren’t as many rocky drops as there were in the first mile of the
ride and I didn’t fall any more after landing in the water.
You’d think that with this experience I would sell my
mountain bike and vow never to ride one ever again, but in the end the ride was
fun and the scenery was cool- very different from road biking. You could smell the moisture in the air and
fresh oxygen from the trees that surrounded us.
I will eventually go back and try that trail again, but in
the meantime I will stick to the ‘bunny slopes’ of mountain biking. They do actually use the same coding system
as skiing and when we looked up the difficulty of the Betasso Pass trail we
rode it was blue (intermediate) and not a green (beginner), as we should have
started out on.
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