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Day 20: Dolores, CO to Telluride, CO
Total Miles: 81.1 (1348.9 mi total)
I'm sitting here in an library in Telluride, one of the most beautiful towns ever, contemplating whether we'll continue on this evening - we'll either bivy here in the park or truck on out to Placerville to ease the miles for tomorrow (we've been riding short days lately, we get the brunt of it done by 1 or 2 then we take a long break - and sometimes fail to continue - eating makes us tired and stuffing our faces seems to be inevitable while off the saddle). We awoke refreshed from our hotel stay and flew up Lizard Head pass. I believe this may be the highest elevation we've hit so far, about 10,500 or so feet. The ride was beautiful, winding roads, huge steep hills, snow capped ridge lines with evidence of huge slides (it's always interesting to see the debris), calf filled pastures, cool temperatures and the oh so wonderful gradual grades of Colorado (good riddance to Utah's 14%'s). Arthur and I hung out at the summit, listened to some reggae, had a little stretch session, enjoyed the view - then downhill to Telluride (or so we thought, much to our surprise there's a mini-summit on your way down, that one was an a-kicker, Arthur and I are both complaining of how much our butts hurt as we walk up and down the stairs at the library).
I tried to post this in Telluride but the blog site doesn't always want to cooperate - we're now in Gunnison and we'll see if the site cooperates this time. We ended up leaving Telluride (named after Tellurium - often found amongst the gold and silver ore) around dusk and hauled to Placerville (it probably took like 20 minutes for us to go 13 miles, not bad for being loaded). We found this awesome park to camp at with clean bathrooms and everything - we had the whole place to ourselves (and spent much time in the bathrooms given the freezing temperatures that evening) except for this dog that sniffed around our tent all night. I make these crazy contraptions to keep our bikes from getting stollen (basically rocks placed precariously on the wheels of our bikes so if anyone moves them in the night we'll be awoken by the clink clink clink of many rocks through the spokes - what we would do after we heard this I haven't thought of ... probably curl up tight in our sleeping bags and hide or something) - all night I thought I kept hearing this sound ... didn't get the best sleep that night.
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Chris Van Leuven
non-member comment
visit!
Arthur and Jess: you must come for a visit! Naomi is here.