RIMROBOD Oct 2023

I just squeaked it in…the road to Sunrise was scheduled to close on October 10th and the Stevens Canyon Road was only open on the weekends. With a fantastic weather forecast in hand, I was able to do this ride on Saturday, October 7th, 2023. Yes, traffic was sometimes heavy, and when I exited the White River entrance on the return trip from Sunrise there were 114 cars waiting to enter the park. Despite the crowds and traffic, this fall ride through the entire park was resplendent with fall colors. My increased cycling fitness from this year’s training made the climbs very manageable, especially with my Salsa Cutthroat bike and its good climbing gears. I’ve talked about margin and it made all the difference, allowing me to meter my watts and energy expenditure over the 13,435 feet of climbing so as to avoid entering the higher zones of activity…just easy spinning the entire day, and the ability to hammer the downhills, as much as I can hammer on a bike that pedals out at about 27 MPH. There are a lot of things on my list I haven’t done this year, but the quality of my outdoor sojourns has been most excellent!

A Magical Day

Following a brutal day peak bagging Mt. Wow, I decided to give my body a rest with some easy cycling. This turned into a day of pure living, attuned to every nuance of the outdoors while at the same time disconnected from effort or stress on the bike. Everything was a joy…parades of pristine waterfalls, bird song, crunching pine cones under my tires, all the smells of the forest, all the breezes of varying temperatures. Unscripted, I turned on the camera and just started talking about how I was feeling, then continued from the West Side Road up to Paradise just to keep the day going. It was a magical feeling of just being grateful to be alive.