by Jess Evans
October 29, 2018
I have done some bike packing in Colorado through the years, but my bike packing trip in 2018 was definitely the best so far. Two of my good friends and racing buddies joined me on a little Colorado adventure in August. Shawn, Jim, and I biked around northern Colorado and then hit the area around Salida, CO. We had no specific time line and no specific place to go. We followed our noses and the locals’ suggestions. We had prepared ourselves for any adventure that might come our way whether it be single track on narrow mountainsides, bike packing on forest service roads, climbing a 14er, and then throwing in a bonus of hitting a few hot springs along the way.
We slept among aspen trees and cows. We woke in the early morning to sheep making such a racket, I thought we had 100s of zombies heading our way. We pushed (and carried) our bikes over rocks and down-trees on a rarely used “overlook” trail. We waited for Jim at an intersection after he blew past our turn on a great downhill. Neither Shawn nor I were going down the hill to get him. We climbed slowly up a 13-mile road to Marshall Pass nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. It took us just over 2 hours to ride it. We sat on mountain sides admiring the beauty of the Rocky Mountains surrounding us. We steered paddle boards on a mountain lake at 8,000 feet, and only Jim fell in. We feared we would be blown off a 14er on the Continental Divide Trail when the 80-mph wind blew hard from the west.
While it was only 7 days, it felt like we had been doing this for ages and were ready to go for an age more. We discovered that biking through the Colorado mountains was far more than we expected with the excellent camaraderie and the everlasting beauty.
