Ghost town on the way to Moab!!

Habs and I headed from Fruita CO Moab UT today. A local "fruitian" told us about back roads (the non-truck route) down there, and that turned out to be a sweet deal. We were both thirsty and saw a little town on the map called Cisco - little did we know, it was an authentic ghost town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco,_Utah)! All of the buildings were run down and there were old cars and abandoned trash and stuff laying around town. We found a general store with a sign that said to honk for service, so we did, but no one came. In fact, the whole place was pretty eerie - even though the town was supposedly abandoned, it felt like there were a few people in some of the run down dwellings watching us (e.g. there was a satellite dish on a the roof of a shack). All in all, it was really cool to walk around in there.

We made it to Moab on a road that paralleled the Colorado river. It was really scenic with all of the red rocks, and we kept stopping to take pics. We tried to take a quick warm up ride (so Habs could get used to her rental bike before we took it out on the slick rock trail), but we got a bit bamboozled by the guy at the bike shop - the trail he recommended blew, and then there were storms moving in rapidly anyways. At least we got to hit the Desert Highlights shop before it closed to sign up for our Thursday canyoneering trip!

Pics:

General store in Cisco


Check out all of the skulls in the background!!


Habs had to go, but ended up having to hold it ;)

Here's the post office...

A little landscape view of how the town looked...I thought we should try to pitch the tent and camp somewhere in there for the night, but Habs wanted no part of that.


Lots of red rock on the way down to Moab!

Oh, and nice blue sky too...

We pitched the tent at a KOA in Moab. This is after a long day in the heat, as if you couldn't tell ;)

Little Hab-attack shows up in Grand Jct!!!

Found a nice little internet cafe today in downtown Fruita and just had to hang out there for a few hours due to the heat. The breakfast burrito was definitely something to write home about (or at least write electronically about ;) Oh yeah, this little downtime was perfect too because I was beat from last night out in the desert. I loved it out there, but it was a little bit of a light sleep, and then of course the greenhouse effect (sun hitting the tent) was in full force in the morning...early!!

I suppose the biggest news of the day was Habs coming into town. I sure hope she likes to rough it in the heat!! We're heading out to Moab UT for a couple of days. On the way to the airport I hit a sweet little disc golf course. It turns out I could have played the course about 8 times though, as Habs's little prop flight was 2 hours late (long time hanging out in the airport!!).

I was going to subject Habs to the rustic campground out in the desert, but decided to break her in easy with an established state park with a few trees for shade. She loved it....I think...........

Ok, enough said for now...

Pics:

Disc golf course on the way to the airport... http://www.pdga.com/course/courses_by_city.php?id=1251


Long putt - nothing but chains people (and no, this is not "take 5" or anything like that ;)


Cha-ching...proof is in the pudding!


Ditto

Here's that nice mountain range that the trees in the disc golf course pics were blocking. Nice and rocky, eh?!!! I was going to take a quick little jog up to the top but I had to pick up Habs at the airport ;)


Little Hab-attack shows up...late...but still smiling (must have been a good day at Scios (http://www.sciosinc.com/home). One thing about showing up late (>= 9pm) in Grand Junction - nothing's open (which actually worked out fine with me, as a gas station beef jerky dinner always hits the spot (Pete, PJ, and Jeffrey would be in heaven). P.S. a big happy 2nd birthday to Jeffrey.

Habs made it through the night

Pancake gluttony and solitude in the desert...

Back at Pfizer, they had made to order pancakes in the cafeteria. Each one was the size of a plate, and I'd typically load up on 2 or 3 (and then be uncomfortably full until at least dinner, and one time until the next day!). Today I drove by an IHOP in Grand Junction and got the urge that just had to be satisfied. These pups (heaping hot heavy stack of 4 in the 100 degree heat!) laid me out for a bit. I had to lay low and go see a movie before taking a late day bike ride.

Ok, so the ride was much more technical than the road 18 trails, but I took it nice and slow due to the full stomach. Another scenic outing - no surprises there!

Last night I stayed at a formal campground/rv park. I really wanted to try something else, something a little more hard core. Yesterday while biking up in the Bookcliffs trails I noticed some camp sites out in the open desert. Seemed like a great idea, but I can't say I didn't second guess myself a couple of times that night. I showed up to the camp site right around 9 when it was pretty dark, and I hadn't even finished setting up the tent before I heard all kinds of animals and saw beady eyes peering at me from all directions (these were rabbits...I don't know what the huffing and puffing was). All in all, it was really cool - the full moon enabled me to see for miles in all directions, and I was out on this plateau where the warm breezes were blowing pretty consistently. I was the only person out there (a good 7-8 miles from town...massive solitude!).

Pics:

Par for the course...endless technical challenges and dangers biking around in Fruita! P.S. I felt shame, so I biked it.


That's the Colorado river down there.


Be careful!


Here's the camp site out in the desert...the full moon out there was incredible. Oh yeah, the tent became an absolute sauna in the early morning when the sun came up!

Fruita

Grand Junction is under 10 miles from Fruita, and Fruita has killer mountain biking, so that was my activity for the afternoon (after I shopped around for a bit to make sure I had a place to sleep tonight…I scored a camp site right in Fruita!)

Not too much to say other than the biking was awesome and remote (I came across 1 person the entire time) and some parts were quite challenging – some great single track climbs and descents in rocky desert terrain. It was super hot too – I’d say at least high 90’s. I biked for about 3 hours on the “starter” trails (a bunch of different trails off “road 18”). Tomorrow I’m going to hit some of the bigger stuff (kokopelli)! If anyone's a biker and is interested, see link for neat pics http://fruita.peterbeers.net/

Of course there are lightning storms that I can see in the distance in 2 different directions after I set up the tent. I even waited until 8p to try to avoid the afternoon t-storms…hopefully I don’t go back to a soaked sleeping bag after dinner (or wait, maybe that’ll add to the challenge ;)

Check out the pics:

When I checked out of the "Two Rivers Inn" in Grand Junction (this is the kind of place it was: (http://www.postindependent.com/article/20070517/FRONTPAGE/70517004), I felt sorry for my next door neighbor's dog "Oscar"...his owner was having a nice cold frostie (early in the morning - I cropped him out to protect the innocent!), so I gave him one of mine. I wonder if Oscar ever got to enjoy it...


Mountain biking in Fruita is sweet!!!

I'm really appreciating the dual suspension bike out here. It's so noticeable how the rear shock eats the rock bumps.

It's pretty desolate out here (and relentless)...

C.B., Aspen, and on to Grand Junction

This'll be another multi-day combined post...the Internet has been much more difficult to find since leaving Denver!

Thurs July 26th:
It rained last night for much of the night (one of those sideways rains) in Crested Butte. Everything was soaked in the morning. I packed up and headed into town for a little ride. It was sunny when I left, so I left the car windows cracked in order to let the tent and tarp dry out. Unfortunately it started raining again before I got back! I also wanted to play the local disc golf course, but it really started pouring so I decided to bag everything and move on to Aspen.

I found the camp site in Aspen (called “Difficult”) pretty easily. However, the camp host didn’t exactly exude a lot of confidence when I checked in…apparently there were 4 bear sightings in the camp today alone. I feel a bit better than there are 43 sites in this campground and most of them are filled (so most likely there are plenty of people that actually ate here with food around whose sites the bear will be more interested in). Oh yeah, I’ll also be sleeping with a hammer and utility knife in the event of a worst case scenario!

I went downtown to eat…Aspen is HUGE in comparison to Crested Butte.

Fri July 27th:
Sweet day – one of those ones where everything seems to fight you! I closed up camp and headed to downtown Aspen to get the lay of the land and play the Aspen mountain disc course.

Downtown Aspen is tough to drive around in – there are tons of people and cars everywhere. All the parking is metered with a max limit of 4 hours, so leaving your car there while going up the mountain isn’t really an option. Also, there were meter maids everywhere dishing out parking tickets. Someone at a visitor booth told me about a new recreation center a few miles outside of town where I’d probably be able to park and get a day pass (i.e. take a shower!). She also said that the tourists can’t seem to figure out that they shouldn’t be bringing their cars downtown (that’s fine…I have no problems walking for miles (although I don’t know if the non-Aspenites would…Aspen felt a lot softer than Crested Butte), but just set up massive parking areas or something on the outskirts). I drove to the rec center (no parking of course for anyone other than center users), and then found another public lot about a mile up the street. I was going to bike the 4-5 miles back downtown, however I couldn’t get my back wheel on due to a brake problem. Drove back downtown and actually found a parking garage (I was lucky to get the last spot!) and carried my bike around to find a bike shop to ask for advice. I found someone who helped me to figure out and fix the problem, but of course the store owner flipped out on the tech and me because there were people awaiting rental bikes and I was a “diversion”! I walked back to the car to exchange my bike for my discs (while weaving through a massive array of police cars and ambulances (someone took a digger on the bike path), and then headed to the gondola (the disc course is at the top of the mountain!). I took the gondola up and started playing the course, however the afternoon storm was well on its way since everything to that point took so long. I made it about halfway through before the lightning and hail came. The storm slowed up for a bit so I got to finish the round, but the gondola had stopped running due to the storm. For fun I decided to walk down rather than wait around (turned out to be way tougher than I thought, but a good time - I took all black diamonds down!). Ok, this is getting long, so to make a long story short:

• I was going to eat in town, but it was a mob scene and still raining, so I bagged out and decided to start driving towards Grand Junction


• All the hotels/motels seemed to be booked along the way (just had to suck it up and get out of the rain after 4 days of it!)


• Eventually I ended up in Grand Junction and I was minutes from sleeping in the car; apparently every hotel room every weekend is booked months in advance during the summer. I was lucky and ended up in a dive motel – nice and run down and 10 feet from the highway!!!

Bottom line – challenge and adversity is sweet!! Hoping for more tomorrow - Bring it on!!!

Pics:

Check out this random hut on one of my rides in Crested Butte!!


Simple living in the hut. Dude forgot to shut the door (oh yeah. there is no door ;)


Check out this little military vehicle in downtown Crested Butte. Habs and I got a ride in one of those out in Australia (some people were taking us to a "bar-b" in the outback). The thing was awesome - it could handle anything e.g. massive ditches and hills, barbed wire, shrubs and trees, etc.


The main street in downtown Crested Butte was small...it was about the same in the other direction...


Ok, made it to Aspen (to try to escape the Crested Butte rain), but of course rain is a threat every night it seems anywhere out in the mountains. Here I'm debating about setting up the tent in the bear-ridden campground...should I set it up now, or go downtown and hope that it rains and passes over by the time I get back? I chose the latter, and it turned out to be a wise move!


At the top of Aspen mountain where the gondola lets you off. No wonder I didn't have the best round of disc - looks like I had a peg leg that day!


The inevitable storm...hey, there's a novelty!


I snapped this before going inside the lodge...the hail piled up pretty quickly, and the temperature dropped massively - it was pretty chilly to play the rest of the round and walk down the mountain in the cold rain in shorts and a t-shirt!


Signature hole...that's a long one!

Oh yeah, a sight for sore eyes...I made it down the mountain!!

My flee bag motel...I'm sleeping on the tarp tonight!

Crested Butte!

Tue July 24th:

Drove from Denver out to Crested Butte (someone at a bike shop in Maine told me that the mountain biking in Crested Butte was awesome, so I figured I’d check it out). It took me a lot longer to get there than I anticipated…in fact I rolled into town about 9:30pm (not the best conditions to go out and find a camp site and set up the tent). I drove around in the national forest for a while near town (in a national forest, you can camp anywhere for free, but in this one it was really tough to find flat ground that wasn't either all overgrown or had cars there already). Anyhow, I ended up finding a rustic camp ground called Cement Creek about 5 miles south of town.

Crested Butte is a bit tough to get to – coming from 70 (the major highway that a lot of the ski resorts like Vail are on), you have to take a single lane road south for about an hour, and then the actual road (Kebler pass) over to Crested Butte is all dirt and over the tops of mountains for about 20 miles (and it’s a slow 20 miles!). It was a heck of a haul, especially once the sun went down.

Oh yeah, I really like the town so far. People here are really into their activities (or so it seems). I ate pizza on the main street, and even in the pitch dark at like 10:30 tons of people were riding bikes all over the place. I felt at home right away – some dude was having a birthday party at the pizza place and when I walked by to go to the bathroom he grabbed my hand and shook it and patted me on the back (either he was bombed and forgot that I wasn’t invited to the party, or he was pretty laid back), and then every time the waitress came over to ask me a question like what kind of beer do you want, etc., she’d respond “sweet” to my every response (just like me!)

Ok, enough for now. Later.

Wed July 25th: (this is a double post - unlike other places along the way, it's much more difficult to get access to the Internet, camp, etc!!)

I packed up the tent at the Cement Creek campground (figured out the rationale for the name – every camp site where you pitch your tent is on a gravel bed!) and headed into downtown Crested Butte. I chatted with people in the bike store about appropriate rides for a newbie to the area, and ended up choosing the Snodgrass trail. The trail head was outside of town, but I was so confident in my abilities that I decided to get the extra exercise and bike there. First mistake – it was all up hill and it took a good 45 mins or so. I was super hot and soaked before I even got to start the ride! The people at the bike store basically said you’ll have to climb a little at the beginning of the trail and then the rest is down hill, so by the time you get back to town you’ll feel great. I guess NJ “a little” is different than Crested Butte “a little”…I climbed for a good couple of hours straight. The elevation was definitely impacting me too (the trail head was well over 8,000 to begin with) – I had to stop quite frequently (sometimes every 50 yards or so in the steep up hill single track sections) and keel over to catch my breath. When I got to the top, a had time to snap a quick photo (the one of me in pain below) before getting the heck off the mountain, as another thunderstorm was rolling in. At least this time I had 2 spare tubes, all the tools to deal with anything, and water/food…a step in the right direction!

Here’s a sweet little story for you – after I got back to town I decided to drive back to the Cement Creek camp site and grab a spot before it was pitch black. The camp host was telling all about their bear encounters (glad I didn’t know about that last night), and showed me a cooler with all kinds of teeth marks in it. Anyways (that’s not the real story), after I set up the tent again I went back into Crested Butte and found an awesome hostile where I could take a shower for $5 and there was an attached laundromat!! It was so much better than the hostile that Habs and I stayed at in London (the one we stayed in by London bridge had bugs coming out of the shower drain, it was 100 degrees in the room, and when we walked around outside people threw eggs at us). Ok, enough of that.

Tomorrow I might hit another ride (the "401" trail is supposedly more difficult than the one today known as a “can’t miss”), and will definitely hit the disc golf course that’s right in town!

Pics:

The drive from Denver west into the Rockies was tough on the Honda...I topped out at around 50mph for much of it. I don't know if the other folks on the road took too well to that! Oh yeah, you can see little greenie in the pic too. He's been great company on the trip ;)


Nice little lake on the way out...at this point, I was still taking my time and stopping here and there to take pics. I thought for sure I'd be in Crested Butte within a couple of hours....didn't happen!


I wonder if it was raining under that little cloud...


Lots of Aspen trees up in Gunnison National Forest


Like I said, I grossly underestimated how long it would take me to get to Crested Butte. I was still way up on Kebler pass when it started to get dark. Good picture opps = cool, snaking your way down the mountain on the dirt road in the dark = uncool.


This is a pic from the Snograss trail, about 2/3 of the way up. That town you see at the base of the mountain is the ski town of Crested Butte. You can't see the downtown of Crested Butte - it's to the right and further down in the valley. For some strange reason I thought it would be a cake walk ride...


At the top of Snodgrass...see storm rolling in!


Me...dying...


Nice singletrack on the way down...