Bringing it home?
This will be my last post for at least 2 weeks (until September 5 or September 6), because I will pause here in Boulder for a couple of weeks to recover and to plan for the next stage of my trip.
On this day, an early start got me out of Estes Park before the traffic got too thick. Five miles of climbing and the rest was downhill, except for Pinewood Springs.
I stopped in Lyons to rest. There I met a bike messenger who was riding a one-gear (not fixed) mountain bike with a trailer. He rides as a bike messenger in Chicago, but he started his bike tour in Santa Ana, California. Touring is a way for him to stay active and outdoors.
Along the way, he had run into a rock n' roll drummer who was bike touring in the Mojave desert who had to be airlifted out because of a heart attack. This guy didn't have a dime to his name, yet he kept riding.
My destination today was my friend Stephen's house in Boulder. But I stopped at a triathlon he was working at first. On my way from the triathlon, I ran into a professional triathlete, Cameron Widoff, who finished third in the tritahlon. I first heard of Cameron when I did the Wildflower Triathlon in 1999. I think he came in first for that triathlon.
This is typical of Boulder. You can run into professional cyclists, kayakers, adventure racers, triathletes, etc. and just have a normal (well "normal") conversation with them. Cameron and I talked about how to minimize the amount of stuff I was carrying. As you can imagine, to go faster and get better performance, professional triathletes and cyclists try to minimize the weight of their bikes as much as possible. A touring bicycle is antithetical to a racing bike. A touring bike has a ton of extra weight. In my case, extra weight that I really didn't need. So Cameron gave me some suggestions about how to lighten the load.
Wilderness and Too Many People
When talking with Cameron, I found really one topic of conversation to be really interesting. How to find an uncrowded place to hike, camp, play. Here in Boulder and especially Estes Park, there are a ton of people. The outdoors is right nearby, but there are a lot of people out on the trails. We talked about how north of here in some of the areas I had just come through, there was uncrowded hiking to be found. Some of those very same places that I found boring and dreary have mountain ranges nearby where the crowds are much less than here in the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
Even though I saw those areas as being full of motorhomes and motorcycles, if one were to drive off the beaten path, one could find good uncrowded places to hike, camp, and play.
Day 37 - Aspenglen to Boulder - 53 Miles
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