Dreaming of biking when the trails are closed.

Winter along the Northern Front Range of Colorado is a tough time to be a mountain biker.  The weather is warm enough to ride, but the trails are usually too wet and sticky to ride on.  We are cursed with the climate.  It snows, but it all melts.  Unlike the Midwest, where I’m from, the snow stays on the ground until March, here, snow melts out after a few days.  Great! You might think that, but then all the trails get wet, sticky, and ice back up.  The constant freeze and thaw cycle makes getting open trail days difficult.  In some ways, I miss the consistent freezing of the midwest.  At least it was like that when I was younger.

The thing to do now is gravel riding.  But in spring here, even those roads are an awful mess.  That and you still need to deal with cars, even worse, rednecks in trucks.  But the great option here is to hit the bike paths.  NoCo has a lot of paths, most are paved.  While it’s not mountain single track, it’s miles, and it can be dicey when you come up against a sudden patch of ice.

Plus, there are sometimes side trails to take, and they tend to dry out before the trails up in the foothills.  Some paths are tempting but might not be acknowledged as allowing bikes.

A lot of time is spent in January and February planning about what you want to do for the year.  

Planning on taking a trip to Bentonville this year.  The planning and the advocacy that has gone into the MTB trails there is immense.  So much of it is rideable right out of town.  That’s fucking awesome.  The weather there gets a little warmer in the early spring than here, but I need to check the amount of rain and temperature.  Nothing would suck more than driving there to find seasonal trail closures.

Fort Collins doesn’t quite have that.  We have some trails that are rideable from the house.  But those areas aren’t connected, and access to the trails West of Horsetooth Reservoir requires you to ride on the road.

I’ve recently joined the Overland trail committee in the hope that I can help develop that garage to foothill connectivity.  It is a process that might be getting one piece at a time.  There are still land managers and planners that are against the idea.  There is also the problem of how the land is divided up around here: Federal, state, county, university, and city all have these weird gerrymandered areas.  One might say yes, but it only takes one to hold up the process.

There is always the urge to travel early to the south for biking.  Seems like a good option, but sometimes the weather at that time of year is not the greatest.  While it might be dry in some places in Arizona and New Mexico, it can be cold as fuck there. Trying to sleep in a tent or a van is a nightmare.  If you go on the cheap, staying in a hotel might not be an option.  

So there are local rides.  At least some places might be dry, or still covered in a layer of snow.  Otherwise, January is the time of dreaming and planning.  That’s not a bad thing.