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!!!
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!!
3 comments:
Andrew, watch out for the thunderstorms, every day between 4-5. Typical Aspen. -JK
So did you sleep soundly thinking that bears were around? Were the sightings of Black bears or Grizzlies? Reminds me of BC and Alberta and especially hiking a few mile outside of Jasper. We used to wear small bells that would jingle while we hiked to avoid startling a bear. Dad
I slept ok...these are black bears only, so in theory they're just hungry and looking for food all the time, not people (I like to believe!!) This came from an avid camper at REI in Denver.
A
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