An Inglorious Dismount – Cycling up Four Mile Canyon

Even Hubby Struggled

A couple weekends past, it was a beautiful Fall day with perfect temperatures, leaves slowly beginning to change and there was the sweet prospect of a ride up a quiet canyon road. In short, it was a perfect cycling moment, which makes this admission that much more difficult. Our goal for the ride was to cycle to Gold Hill, which is about an hours drive from Boulder. It’s a stunningly beautiful ride because the road bends and curves along a tree-lined street. Staring out it’s a gentle roll up Canyon Rd and even when you begin ascending up Four-Mile Canyon the grade is manageable.  However, anytime there is a road labeled Suicide Rd. you know that you probably don’t have enough gears on your bike.

We started the day’s ride from our house, which is east of downtown. Boulder is awesome in that you can ride virtually from one end of town to the other strictly along bike paths, which we did. We took Boulder Creek Path which runs parallel all along Canyon Rd until you are forced to quickly (very) cross Canyon to catch up with Four Mile Canyon. (I say quickly because cars are moving pretty quickly up and down this road, so there’s no time to fiddle with your pedals.)

There was a fire up in Four Mile this year and you don’t fully comprehend the devastation until you come upon both the sensory and physical manifestations of a fire like that. There were points along the road where we smelled the charred trees and vegetation before seeing it.

You could smell the burned out trees before seeing them

I hadn’t realized how horrific the fire must have been and was saddened to see whole sections of trees along the road charred and blackened. But I was relieved to see many homes had survived and some were even rebuilding.

Despite the damage, it was still a beautiful ride. Well, it was until I was forced to do an inglorious dismount. As you can tell from the picture above the road turns to dirt and about 1/2 mile into the off-road my dreams of reaching Gold Hill and having a bevvie at Gold Hill Inn quickly turned to dust, as well. I just couldn’t turn the pedals. To be fair I hadn’t ridden much in the mountains this summer for a variety of reasons and I’m still sporting a double crank instead of the more age-appropriate triple or compact crank. But still. This was first time in a very long time I’ve had to stop and dismount. The only face saving relief from the ordeal was that I dismounted before I was unable to completely turn the pedals and unclick from them. It would have been quite humiliating to have hubby and his friend lift the bike off of me.

The Cartoon Blog by Dave Walker