Tuesday

Yesterday we decided to take the day off. The 97 degree heat and lots of short anaerobic bursts took a toll on us so we took advantage of the cable and watched some of the US Open Tennis tourney and took a quick trip to the Over The Edge Bicycle Shop. I also made it out to the hot tub and ran into 4 guys from Australia and New Zealand that had been working at a summer camp near Asheville NC and were working their way back to their flight home via some great mountain biking sites. I also got a chance to clean the bikes up pretty well and patch my flat tubeless that I had been running a tube in. This morning, Tuesday, we packed up and headed for Gunnison Co, just outside of Crested Butte, one of the mountain biking meccas. The drive over was a little more adventurous than I had anticipated, up and down and twisty, but other than holding up a few cars at one point, no issues at all. We were actually held up by some chick in a jeep that we actually saw holding a camera out the window while she was driving at one point snapping pictures. We got to camp and Howie had set us up with another pull through so getting in was a snap. We got things set up and saw that the afternoon storms had set up in the mountains so heading up to Crested Butte seemed like a bad idea so we settled for Hartman Rocks, just outside of Gunnison. We got a little screwed up to start and after an initial hike a bike we ran into a gravel road that we rode down looking for all this supposed single track. After a couple miles and some disappointment we finally found a signed intersection with some real single track. We traversed down then up through some washes and small canyons then across the mesa.

We could see storms on three sides of us but it was still sunny where we were. At the next intersection we decided the smart move would be to start heading towards the vehicle and we actually did the smart thing. We ran out of trail and consulted the map but were not sure which end of the trail were at so we headed down the jeep trail to find another trail marker to figure it out. We found the start of Rattlesnake trail, I think it was named more for the twisty nature of it rather than critters found on it. It was starting to get dark and we had not really checked the map, but it seemed like it was headed in the right direction. It was definitely the most technical of what we had rode, up and down through some pretty sweet rock formations and seemed to keep heading where we wanted to go. It started to rain on us and the trail still was not ending, causing a bit of consternation, but we soon saw a marker and found a jeep trail that we were able to follow back to the vehicle although the rain had slopped thing up a bit and got the bikes and ourselves quite messy. We headed into Gunnison for some pizza then grocery shopping at a Safeway that had probably been remodeled in the early 80’s at best. Back at camp we have no TV again so we are checking out the video footage from Fruita.