Yesterday, I went on an adventure with a couple of interesting misadventures along the way. I planned a geocaching bike ride in the area of Red Rocks park. There are 18 or so caches hidden in the area and I wanted to see how many I could get. The path would be about 6 miles long down and up some mountain bike trails that did not appear to be all that challenging. Well, it turned out differently and this bike ride turned out to be the most challenging bike ride I have ever been on.
Having left work early, I got home and got everything ready and headed out with the bike on the back of the car. I arrive at the trailhead near Alameda and C470 about 1:30 and 6065 feet in elevation. I put my camelback on loaded with water and stuffed my geocaching stuff in my bike shirt pockets. The GPS receiver went on the bike mount and off I went.
The first part of the trail is a switchback up the side of North Dinosaur Ridge. It's an elevation gain of about 400 feet to the first trail junction. Turning right and heading uphill another 50 feet on a rocky trail is where the first cache was. I also found a few other caches on this part of the ridge. From the car to the high point was a gain of about 550 feet altogether. I then continued down the hill to the parking lot at Metthews-Winters park where there is another bicycle trailhead and a number of additional geocaches. At this point, I was at 6338 feet.
The trail in Matthew-Winters park is lengthy with mostly a modest slope. It was not as steep overall as the switchback up Dinosaur Ridge but it did have its moments. The highpoint on this trail is at 6800 feet so that made another gain of almost 500 feet!
I rode with 4 teenagers on this part of the trail and they had been up there before. They advised me to lower my bike seat for the trip back down the other side of the trail. This was a very good idea due to the steepness and roughness of the trail. There are lots of exposed rocks and bumps and a lower center of gravity made this a good plan. By the time I reached a road crossing, I was at 6220 feet, an elevation loss of 580 feet and that was in about 1/4 of the trail length as the distance to get up to the high point.
On the way down this hill, there is a cache hidden hanging in a tree. When I approached the area, there was another biker resting in the shade of the tree. I stopped and chatted a while about the trail he was about to go up. He wasn't ready to leave so I told him all about geocaching. He said he would check out the geocaching.com website and he seemed genuinely interested. I showed him the cache when I found it.
At this point, I was in Red Rocks park. I found a couple of caches there. One of the ones I did not find was by a small cemetery that is in the park. It's the old Morrison cemetery. The cache is hidden inside of a hollow square pole. You have to stick your finger in the hole from underneath and the cache can be found there magnetically attached. When I was there, I was not willing to stick my finger in the hole so I did not find the cache. It was a good thing too since when I later read the logs on the cache, I discovered that there is a family of wasps who live in that very same hole! The last person who found the cache got stung on his finger. The cemetery is at 6000 feet.
The next cache I found was not too far away and it is a film canister hidden under a rock. After this find, I was facing the biggest climb of the day...
Did I mention how hot it was? It was well into the 90s. It was not too long after this point that I ran out of water with a couple of difficult miles to go. Not good. The high point on this next climb was 6575 feet - another gain of 575 feet, with no water, rubber legs, and a rocky trail so rough and steep that I walked and pushed the bike more than I rode. I took lots of breaks. When I finally reached the downhill switchbacks, the same ones I rode up at the beginning of the ride, I was quite relieved and really enjoyed that bit of downhill back to the car. I arrived at the car more than 2 hours after I expected to. The ride was almost 12 miles rather than the 6 that I expected.
I found 15 of the 18 geocaches that I went to find so it was a very good day in that respect. I was very exhausted when I got home but did sleep very well last night!
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That was exhausting just reading about it! And it certainly was hot yesterday so it must have been very challenging. You should get extra points for the verticle climbs and descents as well as locating the caches. Very well done and interesting to hear about.
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