In a recent ongoing effort to sample the growing number of Gravel Races throughout Colorado, I was successfully able to convince Ben and my brother to sign up for the Salida 76 this year, along with Gaper Kevin who has slogged up a number of races with me over the years. Salida 76 seemed like a great compromise. Of course, it fell on a weekend that saw the most precipitation of the summer, after what seemed like 40-50 straight days of sun and dry. But that’s all part of the experience right? It was a torrential downpour on me on the entire drive down there and I got stuck behind an excavator around Fairplay and could no longer see the road, much less a place to pass, all the way until arriving in Salida. Keep Reading…
Last month Anna-Lisa and I spent a week up in the Olympic Peninsula region of Washington State. While we didn’t hike every single day of the trip, there was no way we were leaving without checking out one of the most beautiful, classic loops in Olympic Nation Park – the Seven Lakes High Divide Loop.
Most often done as a backpack, the 20-mile loop boasts ~4,800 feet of elevation gain and traces out a big circle around the Seven Lakes Plateau. The route starts and ends at the Sul Doc Trailhead, about an hour’s drive east of Forks. We chose to do the loop in the counterclockwise direction, first climbing up to Deer Lake. This gets the elevation gain over with earlier in the day and leaves the long, gradual descent down the Sol Duc Valley for the end. The first miles up to Deer Lake are steep but the forest is spectacular. We climbed up through a layer of fog as the sun’s rays were just cresting a nearby ridgeline. Keep Reading….
Leadville’s Silver Rush 50 is a run and bike race series that was first held in 2008. The races act as a qualifier for the Leadville 100 and seems to become more and more popular every year.
Several years ago I completed the Silver Rush 50 Run and I’d always wanted to head back and try the MTB version someday. This year wound up being the year, as Parker pitched the idea to me over the winter that we should both sign up.
Parker and I are usually pretty evenly matched on bikes so we were able to stick together for nearly the entire race. With a significant portion of the field on lightweight XC bikes and hard tails, we knew neither of us were going to be breaking any speed records. The main goal was to finish the race, not crash, and enjoy the day. One of the reasons I had interest in this particular race on the bike is that nearly all of it entails fire roads. This makes it much easier to pass people, and perhaps much more pertinently, be passed. Keep Reading….
Residing deep in the Rio Grande National Forest east of Piedra Pass, South River Peak is known as one of the peskier Colorado 13ers not by it’s technical rating or loose rock, but the length of its approach from any trailhead. There are essentially 2 options – a shorter, steeper route from the north involving some bushwhacking below tree line, or a longer, more gradual route from the south that passes by a natural hot spring along the way. Keep Reading…
