After leaving Boulder, as it turns out, the views only got better and better. What comes along with all this beautiful mountain scenery though is the climbing that goes along with those said mountains. But don’t worry, we will get our fair share of descents as well.
Ride Overview
Mileage: 46.4 Miles
Elevation: 4,929 ft.
Tales of the Trails
Today was a slightly less exciting morning routine as Cole, coming down with a sickness, would not be rolling out with the team today. He is taking a few days to rest, recover, and get back to feeling 100% before he will rejoin the rest of the team again. In other news though the team was both excited and a little nervous to get back to biking as today would be our first day entering a new “climbing phase” of the trip. This is the beginning of our actual climbs and we will be rather rapidly gaining elevation over the next week. On our ride today we ended 2,100 feet higher than what we started at.
The entire day from mile 1 to the last mile was filled with beautiful views. The team was on nice paved bike paths for the first 10 miles out of Boulder. All of us noticed just how big cycling is when we got further into Central Colorado. All of the drivers seem much more comfortable driving with cyclists, and the cities are built with bikes in mind. It is always wonderful to be able to get out of a city on bike paths instead of having to take very busy congested roads. Once we got a bit further outside the city, we looked up and saw all the mountains around us. This however made us realize that at some point we would have to start going over them. Today was not quite the day. The climbs were definitely getting more significant though.
After a gas station as our first rest stop at mile 20 the bike paths gave way to a highway and our 10 mile climb began. Our legs were quite shocked as we had gotten used to the flat roads of the midwest. We had trained for these hills back in Pennsylvania so pretty soon our legs remembered their training and we “flew up the hill.” These mountains are very different from the hills earlier in our ride. In the first few weeks all our climbs were usually less than a mile but very steep, whereas these climbs from Colorado onwards will mostly be longer but less steep. Biking through the passes in a couple days our climbs will range anywhere from 5 all the way to 25 miles. This being said the team was mostly very excited for this as huge climbs means that the scenery gets a lot better. Since we all go to school in central Illinois, the mountains are a very stark contrast from our usual backdrop,
Our second rest stop was at the top of the climb. This rest stop was at a trailhead, but it was quite eventful. We met some runners on the trail in the midst of a 16-mile run. Speaking of running, Maaike, who was driving the van, along with Nishk decided to run a mile in the parking lot. While Maaike had on running shoes, Nishk decided to ditch the bike shoes to run in socks. This was quite impressive to the rest of the team who was already a little tired from the climb. While everyone was getting snacks and more water we all lined up to cheer them on and give them high-fives after every lap. We rolled out soon after and the rest of the ride was some of the best scenery and roads we have seen in our entire trip in my opinion. There were so many rivers on the sides of the road and mountains in the background that it didn’t even look real. Around 10 miles until the end a bike path was closed and we had to call a city pickup truck to shuttle us about 5 miles. After this we rolled into Idaho Springs where a hotel graciously gave us two hotel rooms for our team to stay in.
We rolled in around 2 pm, so the team was all able to go out to dinner together to get grilled cheese sandwiches. After dinner and showering the team all sat down to watch the original Illini4000 documentary from 2007 together. This was an amazing experience as we all got to see what the original team went through. Seeing how important the cause was to them all really shifted our perspective on the ride. We have always felt strongly about the cause and it has been really important to us, but the original team we could really tell it was deeply important. Sometimes we can focus on the biking a bit too much, so it is very nice to take a step back and reflect on the cause and why we are doing this. In other news, the team was very excited to get a good night's rest in a hotel bed instead of the usual sleeping bag on the floor.
