The day started at 5:30 am with me trying to capture some cute and cuddly little mice at my study site.  (I am attempting to complete my Master's Thesis project on the effects of recreational trails on small mammal movement.)  No mice again!  This is a first.  I found an area without deer mice or any sort of small mammals whatsoever! Very bizarre I tell you.
Anyway...I then caffeinate and mosey up to the Nederland galaxy to meet my co-pilots DK, Joey, Timmy, Berto, and a couple of other's from another galaxy.  We started on our epic.  We intentionally tried to go slow at the start because we were heading into the Rollins Pass stratosphere (the upper atmosphere of Boulder and even Nederland).  We started up West Mongolia to Tennessee Mountain (which is not an easy climb...exposed roots and quite steep).  The roots treated me well today, no slams to the face for me. Murphy's law rules that with any 4+ pilot formation, something is bound to go wrong ...too many moving parts.  So what happened up almost at the top of the first bitch-of-a-climb? Well Timmy's plastic rear derailleur (guess who...) gets sabotaged by a mini-wood nymph!  Nobody saw it happen, by we know what happened: The creature from the woods came barrelling out with his or her tiny (but heavy duty) mini sledgehammer, and just WACKED the hell out of that derailleur!  This derailleur was dead, no way to fix it, so we took it off and made it a single speed, but with the bumps and the not so good chain tension, the bike was on auto-drive.
Tim has to bail out.
We know very well that as soon as a group gets above 4 pilots, the creatures of the woods start trying to reduce the pack.  Sometimes it's taco'd wheels, sometimes it's a sidewall blowout, sometimes it's a broken derailleur...but something WILL happen you just watch.  A ride can turn from 3 hours into 6 just like that.  This is another warning: don't take large groups out on the trail!  I do it but once a year for the Intergalactic Single Speed Championships.  (See the headlines for info).

Anyway...heading into Rising Sun at light speed and down into to forbidden the Ski trail zone, our asses were beginning to realize the outlook of the day.  This is moon-crater land...your tires barely hit the dirt here.  We might as well of stayed home and hit eachother's butts with sledgehammers.


Meriweather (left) and DK on the top of the ski mtn.

Up and over the local ski trails, we head onto the wood creature's super highway. Made many years ago by Sapien Homo's, this clear-cut of a "trail" houses a gas pipeline that carries gas from here to there, to fuel up all the motorized vehicles on the top of Rollins pass in order for them to "get away from it all."
Up and down (mostly up) we give ourselves saddle sores and butt-rash up these "trails" that ride over old granite rocks broken up by the last lunar glaciation..  At times it looked as if we were riding up an abandoned ski slope...pick your line fellas!  Elk prints and bear pooh abound, we push upwards.  Our destination was the top of Rollins Pass (about 12,550 feet elevation) and our start point was about 8,000 ft.

Eventually we arrive at the top of the pipeline and that's where we see our destination.

Rollin's Pass is not as pristine as it once was with all the motorized recreationists revving up their engines and the tourists in their cars.  We eventually come out of the woods looking like some high, dirty, lost freaks to a world that I wish didn't exist.  I wish there weren't a road to the top of Rollin's Pass.  I wish there weren't motorized vehicles allowed up there (or couldn't get up there cause there'd be no roads!).  Yes, I'm selfish but for a good reason...I love the outdoors for not only what it does for ME, but for what it IS.  It is a home to millions of other creatures that NEED it to survive.  It is their home and we are mere visitors, tourists.  We (humans) took ourselves out of nature only to come back with a vengeance and start trying to crush it to a pulp.  Least we have some respect for that which created us and for those animals which are our relatives?
I wish I didn't love getting outside so much, cause I SHOULD get out also!  The fewer visitors the better! The less the impact that we humans would have.  I want to be there though, but I will only do it via Mountain bike or by foot.
We climb up to the shelf road that leads to the top of Rollins Pass from where we are.  When we reach the "road" there are a couple of very old and Sketchy railroad tressels that tell all to not cross...but everyone does cause the view off of them is intense.  The tressels seem to be held in place on scree fields by only a couple of pillars that look to be rotted and very old.  The things are still very sturdy still after all these years, though.  We come upon a rock that overhangs a cliff that overhangs a valley probably 1000 ft. below.  The picture below doesn't give the rock justice.


On the other side of this rock is a steep cliff that drops a good rocky 1,000 ft.

At the limit of our oxygen and glycogen stores (Berto and a couple others were starting to swerve), we take a trail down to Yankee Doodle Lake where the motorists were swarming around mud puddles and BBQ stations all waiting to gorge and weed themselves out.  Billy bob passed us about 5 times making sure to strut his no-helmet-wife-beater-tank-top-two-stroke-strutting masterpiece of an ape form for all to see.  Then a spanking new Dodge ram truck comes grinding up the dirt road (that doubles as an erosion streambed) only to park at his friend's campsite (his site is a mere 100 feet away).  A very large beast exits from the driver's seat.  We're not sure what species he was, but we're sure he was an alien of the gapped-tooth kind.  He had a youngin' along with him to corrupt indefinately.
Passing by these scary creatures, we happen upon Tim!!  He had ridden home to retrieve his single speed and then had ridden up Jenny Creek trail (heinous) to meet us!  What a freak!  I will NEVER ride up that trail, especially on a single!
However, we decide to ride down that rocky piece of a trail cause we're tired and it's the fastest way down to the ski mountain.
Finding some sweet singletrack along the way, we end up a Very Male (a sweet trail that I don't remember where it is).  It drops very fast into where we want to go and then we are there.  How's that for a description?  Now go and find it for yourself, or don't.
Spinning back to town, we opt for the Tungsten Grill for a few stout's and burgers (veggie burger for me thank you).
All in all, we were out for  8 hours and probably 6 of that was actually riding.
Until the next epic...next weekend.
lates.