Timp Foothills, Aug 5

This was a solo Mountain Bike ride by Brian on Wednesday morning. Michelle is going to spin class at the gym on Wednesday morning and is trying to get me to come along. But I refuse to ride a bike in the gym while the riding is good outside. So I got up early to ride - leaving the house about 6:45. I realized that I could combine my bike ride with my ride to work by going to the Timp foothills just above where I work. (This is called the long commute to work.)

So I started out with the 4.5 miles ride to work, and then rode up Cascade Dr to the water tower parking lot. By the time I did this I was already tired, but I was really happy that I made it up Cascade Drive without any breaks. From there I went up Betty. My plan was to find Roller Coaster and ride it down then decide whether I was going to do more or be done.

I had seen a turnoff on Betty that I thought was Roller Coaster, but after taking it realized that it was just an alternate way to ride Betty and looped back to Betty a little bit down the trail. So I decided maybe that was it for today and I would try another time. So I started riding Betty back toward Water Tower Road. I came across another trail and decided to check it out - I thought it was way to close to Water Tower Road to be any of the trails on the map. At first the trail started out quite easy - it lured me in. Eventually it got quite steep, but by then I had gone far enough I was committed to keep following it. Eventually it merged with Area 51. In looking at the map after, I'm 99% sure I went up Crank to get to Area 51.

I'd been on Area 51 before so I knew I was heading toward Dry Canyon. After riding down Area 51, I couldn't believe I realized it was really steep. It kinda freaked me out that I had ridden it. After that I went down the last 1/2 mile of Dry Canyon and on the BST back to to the parking lot, down Cascade Dr, and to work.