Spring Break

For many years, we had a tradition of going to Moab for spring break, to enjoy the warmer weather, sunshine, and drier trails than were available in the Denver area.  It was great: we'd get the first sunburns of the season, the first saddle sores, the first wobbly legs from pushing hard on a long bike ride.  This year, we got the chance to revive that tradition and introduce it to Cailan.

We left our house on Saturday morning, not so early that we couldn't have a nice French toast breakfast but not too late either.  We wanted to arrive in Moab with plenty of time to find a campsite, a task that we were worried could be difficult, since it was the weekend of the annual Moab Skinny Tire Festival.  Fortunately our location gives us a headstart on all those Denverites, and by 11:00 we had found a campsite by the Colorado River and were setting up our tent.  We gave Cailan and Utah strict admonitions about going too close to the river's edge - one of them listened. After a picnic lunch, we set out for the trails.

We went to a fairly new area called the Moab Brand Trails, a trail system with several loops of varying degrees of difficulty. In a very uncharacteristic move, I didn't buckle on my bike shoes and slap my helmet on my head; instead, I found myself tying on my running sneakers. I am getting ready for my first half-marathon in April, and I really needed to do a long run this weekend to stay on top of my training schedule. Chris and Cailan geared up for a ride on the big yellow tandom, and we all headed out in the same direction, heading along the EZ Trail toward the Bar M loop. Chris and Cailan soon pulled ahead of me, though they paused a couple times to give me a drink from a Camelbak and to snap a picture.

I saw them again after another mile or so. They had stopped near the junction of EZ and Bar M to look for a geocache. I grabbed another sip of water and kept moving. It was a gorgeous day: sunny and somewhere in the mid-60s, a very comfortable temperature for running. The scenery was spectacular. From the Bar M trail I could see many of the rock formations in Arches National Park, as well as the La Sal mountains. The EZ trail was narrow and windy, a soft dirt surface studded occasionally with rocks. The Bar M trail was wide and hard-packed with many sections of slickrock. Both were fun to run on, and the trail system is well marked, with signs at every trail junction and trail maps at many of the intersections.

After I'd gone about four miles, I started to wonder why I hadn't seen Chris and Cailan again. They had been planning to ride the Bar M loop also, and even though Cailan doesn't pedal very hard, they can easily outpace my running speed. But they had several geocaches to hunt for, not to mention any lizards, rocks, flowers, or sticks that caught Cailan's attention, so I wasn't too surprised. At 5.5 miles, I could have taken a cut-off trail back towards the parking area, then caught the Lazy trail to get back to the truck, but I decided to stick to the Bar M, so the boys wouldn't get worried if they didn't catch me. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that left turn, because after 6 miles, the Bar M trail stopped being quite so fun. The trail surface alternated between soft loose dirt and deep sand, and the trail went up and down a series of gullies - each up started to feel longer and steeper than the last one. Eventually the trail curved around to the left, turned into a gravel road with a long gradual climb, and was parallel to the highway; it was not nearly so scenic and at a point in the run where I really could have used some distraction to keep me going.

At 8.25 miles I was back at the parking lot, and Chris and Cailan weren't there. I called Chris and, after a couple of missed calls due to bad reception, learned that he was on the Bar M trail, at the top of one of those gullies, with a pinch flat. He'd unpacked his spare tube, only to discover that it also had been the victim of a pinch flat. He opened his patch kit, and found one lonely patch left - not enough to fix the two holes left by a pinch flat. I couldn't do anything to rescue him - I didn't have any keys to the truck. I couldn't even ride my bike to them, because my bike was locked on the roof rack, and Chris had the only keys. Fortunately, on a spring weekend in Moab, you don't usually have to wait long to meet someone else on the trail, and soon he had met a couple bikers with a well-stocked patch kit.

Cailan kept himself busy during the tire change by taking pictures with Chris's camera. I think when they finally got back to the truck, he had taken over 100 pictures, including a couple dozen shots of Utah (including a few that were in focus), countless pictures of dirt, a nice series of Chris in action with the bike pump, and some self portraits.

We all had water and snacks, then we pulled my bike down from the roof, I changed shoes and plopped my helmet on, and the four of us took a spin on the EZ Lazy loop. This was about 3.5 miles of easy but fun trail, a few bumps to go over and some nice swoopy downhill singletrack. At least, I think it would have been easy if I hadn't just finished an eight-mile trail run. My legs felt a bit like jelly. Back at the parking lot again, Chris unloaded his single bike and went to look for a little more challenging trail. Cailan and I hung out near the truck, casting spells with our magic wands (which closely resemble drumsticks) and collecting magic rocks. I'm not sure what exactly was magic about the rocks, but we sure did find a lot of them. The sun started to disappear early as it sunk behind some rock towers in the west, casting our play area into shadow and sending me to the truck to dig up long pants and a sweatshirt. When Chris returned, we loaded up and drove into town to buy a patch kit and a spare tube and enjoy dinner at Eddie McStiff's..

Then we went to our campsite along the river and started to get ready for bed. Of course, we had time to cast a few more spells in the dark, before retiring to our tent.

Signs of Spring

It's April and we're seeing signs of spring, both at home

the forsythia in front of our house

new sidewalk chalk

and on the trail.

The most shocking sign of spring comes when we go from sharing the trails with just a few hardy West-slopers during the winter, to sharing with visitors from the more populous areas of the state. Once the ski resorts close, they drive on through the mountains to our neck of the woods.

Here are the details of our ride.

Double header

It finally feels like spring here! To celebrate, we tried to spend as much of the weekend as possible outside. On Saturday, this meant a picnic at a park, a trip to help some friends check out a bike for sale, and a family bike ride at 18 Road. We took 3 bikes: 1 tandem set up for a child stoker plus 2 single mountain bikes.

When we got to the parking area, we found several other cars: more crowded than it would be on a cold winter day or during the heat of summer, but less crowded than a weekend in May. The four of us (Chris, Heather, Cailan, and Utah) started out for a ride. We decided to take the dirt road up rather than the trail, to make it a little easier on Chris and Cailan. However, we remembered that roads are boring, so when there was an option to take a trail, we did so. There have been a lot of cows grazing in the area the last couple months, so the trails here are pocked with hoofprints and extra bumpy.

We ended up meandering through the campground, and then we got to the top of our climb. Time to swoop down Kessel's Run:

I like this picture because you can see how the trail dips and curves as it crosses back and forth over a dry creek bed.

Cailan is paying more attention to the scenery than to the act of biking - this was true on the climb as well!

After the first loop, Chris and Cailan hung out at the trailhead while I took my single bike and my trusty dog for a loop. Then it was Chris's turn to ride while Cailan and I took a short hike. Sadly, it is too early in the year for lizards, flowers, or insects, so we didn't get to discover many things on our walk. We ended the day with pizza at the Hot Tomato in Fruita.

Here's Cailan, after his post-ride shower, sporting his new red bathrobe.

Sunday, Cailan played with Bobbie while Chris and I went for a more-challenging ride at Lunch Loops. Here's me on the trail with the snowy Grand Mesa in the background:

We took a route with a lot of climbing, and a bit of hike-a-biking, but we were rewarded with this view at the top.

The Lunch Loops area sees a lot of change: trails get closed for revegetation, or re-routed for erosion control, and new trails show up pretty frequently. This year, a huge new addition opened up: a pump track and a jump park. Chris and I didn't ride there, but here's a picture for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing.

Getting Away with Something

The weather here was sunny and pleasant at the end of January; Chris and I had the feeling that we were getting away with something when we loaded up a bike and headed to Moab on the last Saturday of the month. Usually going to Moab means mountain biking, but this time we did something a little different:

Cailan and Grandma Bobbie went along on the trip. They dropped us off at a scenic overlook, where they stayed for three hours having a picnic and playing with dinosaurs in the snow. Chris and I biked up the road towards Dead Horse Point State Park.

It was quite a bit of climbing for the first 10 miles - strenuous but not so exhausting as to prevent us from admiring the views of red mesas, brown sandstone, and snowy mountains. Then we turned on to the road to the park and went gradually downhill for 8 miles until the road ends at a famous overlook.

We retraced our path back to the drop-off point; most of that went by very quickly in a big downhill blur. I tried not to look at the spedometer. From there we headed into the town of Moab to find Cailan and Grandma Bobbie. It got uncomfortably cold on the way, especially when the winter sun sank below the level of the canyon walls and we were zooming downhill on a snow-covered bike path, but we were able to warm up with big plates of pizza and pasta at Pasta Jay's.

The weather smiled for us again on the first Saturday of February. Once again we felt like we were getting away with something. This time we took the mountain tandem to our familiar but beloved trails just west of Fruita. We started the ride in warm sunshine, but it did cloud up when we reached our turn-around point and we even got hit with a few snow flurries on the way back.

Most of the trail we rode was free of snow, but the sandy surface of the trail was very soft, saturated like a sponge, which made the going pretty slow. We decided to stick to the main trail, Mary's Loop, because all of the side trails go through small canyons and would probably be snowy, icy, muddy, or some combination of the three.

Three days after that ride, though, we woke up to this:

a fluffy white reminder that we're not out of winter yet.

Fall camping

Summer has lingered here, long past the equinox. Although the nights are cooling off more now than they were in August, the days have still been sunny and hot. Perfect weather for camping, so over the weekend we headed up to the Uncompahgre Plateau. Just 45 miles from our house, we found ourselves on a dusty dirt road surrounded by ponderosa pines and golden aspen and brilliant blue sky.


Once we found a good campsite, we set up our tent and then ate lunch. Then we took a short bike ride, Chris pulling Cailan on the trail-a-bike, to the end of the road. The view from here was immense and yet intricate: layers on layers of canyons, cliffs, towers, and broad flat mesas, all leading up to the peaks of the La Sal mountains in Utah.


Cailan was unimpressed by the scenery but found the texture of the dirt to be extremely well suited to finger painting.


On the way back down to the campsite, we stopped at a pond where we discovered some “wild” life. Utah’s herding instincts seemed to rise up from some hidden corner of his brain, spurring him to bound away and give these cows what for.


I’m trying to get ready to run a 10K in December, and today was a “run day” on my training plan, so once we got back to the truck I swapped bike shoes for sneakers and headed back up the road. At 4500 feet higher than Grand Junction, and going steadily uphill, it might be more accurately described as a crawl instead of a run, but I survived my scheduled miles. After that it was Chris’s turn to take a more challenging bike ride. Cailan played in the tent with dinosaurs while I recovered, and then we went on a “colorful leaf hunt”.


If you asked me to find the most beautiful aspen leaf, I would look on the ground for a leaf with the classic heart shape, with a deep golden color unblemished from edge to edge. Cailan had a different take on what makes a leaf beautiful. He was drawn to leaves with patterns, that were brown along the edges or yellow spotted with brown. He named them for their patterns: Cheetah, Ocelot Ray, Tiger, Swallowtail, Edges, Half-n-half. Leaves that were all brown he described as looking like pictures from an I Spy book. If he found a twig on the ground with a few leaves still clinging to it, he called it a balloon stick. He picked up each leaf that caught his eye and handed it to me, saying “Look at this beautiful leaf!”

We were still on our leaf hunt when Utah and Chris returned, bouncing and sweaty, respectively. My hands were stuffed with beautiful leaves and balloon sticks, and Cailan kept bringing me more and more. He apparently didn’t need to hang on to them long term; I set them down in a careful pile near our tent so we could find them again if we needed to, but he didn’t ask for the ones he had gathered before – he was all catch and release that day.


Chris and Utah had a nice, 11-mile ride on rocky dirt road and singletrack trail. The trail had been mostly downhill, with a return on road, including a mile-long section that was unmercifully steep and strewn with rocks:


Other sections of the road were smoother and easier to travel, leaving a bit of energy to enjoy the scenery.


We made a quick dinner (angel hair pasta with olive oil, herbs and cheese) and then scrambled through the aspen towards the west, to get a good view of the sunset. It wasn’t quite as magnificent as the view at the end of the road, but it was pretty good.




We crawled into the tent with the last bit of light fading from the sky and introduced Cailan to the grand camping tradition of playing cards in the tent until bedtime. It was Cailan’s first time playing Crazy Eights and he found it tremendous fun – I think he would have played until midnight if we hadn’t cut him off and tucked him into his sleeping bag.

Crested Butte - Day 2

We started the day by going to Strand Hill, where a set of trails takes off from a dirt road. Shaun, Chris, Utah and Amos took off on bikes and paws on the Strand Hill trail, while Cindy, Abbey, Quinn, Cailan and I went for a hike on the Canal Trail. The trails here are not real hard, but they present one big challenge: the irrigation canal that lies between the dirt road and the trails. There are two options - you can slog through a muddy bog, wade through the knee-deep water of the canal and pick up the trail right on the other side of the canal, or you can go further up the dirt road, cross over the canal where it runs through a culvert, and bushwhack up a steep, sage-covered hill to get to the trail at the top of a ridge. At the beginning, we all bushwhacked.

Cailan entertained us on the hike by telling us about the Woolly Wiley Wulls, large, green, humanivorous monsters that so closely resemble trees it is hard to tell, when you're looking at a forest, which are the actual trees and which are the Woolly Wiley Wulls. I could never guess correctly, but fortunately Cailan was always able to tell which ones were the monsters so we could steer clear of them. We composed a song about them as we walked. The chorus went like this:

I'm a Woolly Wiley Wull
and I like to eat people
First I bite off all their heads
and then chew on their bones.

The verses told how Woolly Wiley Wulls use chicken for gum and fish for medicine and all sorts of digestive details that were fascinating to the 4- and 7-year-old boys among us but are probably not fit to be recorded in writing. Other highlights of the hike were the wildflowers (some of which could be used as spyglasses for spotting Woolly Wiley Wulls), the M&Ms in my bag of trail mix, and the time when Quinn was walking backwards and tripped over a mushroom.

After we had turned around and headed back to the start, our hiking party encountered the bikers and the dogs where our trails intersected. Everyone was muddy:


We returned to the cabin for lunch, then set out again for a big group ride. This time we were going to do the Upper Loop trail. Not the Lower Loop or the Upper Lower Loop we had ridden the day before, and certainly not the Upper Upper Loop. (I'm not making these trail names up!) We parked in town, near the visitor's center, and rode through some neighborhoods, past Rainbow Park where Chris, Cailan, and I watched fireworks on the 4th of July, till we got to the paved bike path which runs from the town of Crested Butte uphill to the ski resort at Mt Crested Butte. It's much nicer to bike this route instead of on the road, with cars seeming to fly by while you crawl along slowly feeling that your lungs might burst.

Our tandem train met with some difficulties on this hill. The pedals on Cailan's trail-a-bike were very cheap, flimsy plastic ones that tended to come unscrewed from the crankarms. Cailan's preference for pedaling backwards makes this problem even worse, and since we had rigged up straps to secure his feet to the pedals, when the pedals come unscrewed they remain attached to his foot. We had to stop several times to screw the pedals back on, but these stops also gave us opportunity to breathe. Quinn also had some trouble with this climb, because it is so steep and goes on for ever so long. Finally we arrived at the top, and we stopped for a snack. We ignored the gathering thunderclouds.



The Upper Loop trail was very fun, a narrow path running along the side of a ridge, almost hidden by wildflowers. There were some sections where we darted through aspens, and one of these was a very rocky, rooty, steep descent. Most of us walked that part.



We left Upper Loop where it intersected with Tony's Trail, giving us a shorter route back to town. There were some huge boulders we stopped to play on. Shaun rode over the boulder in this picture - alas, we didn't get a photo of that!


Tony's Trail was an easy descent through a meadow on gently curving switchbacks, leading us to a dirt road we took back to town. As we left the dirt road, we had to ride over a cattle guard and under a gate that blocks cars from the road. Quinn went under the gate with ease; our tandem train had to dismount.

We went into town to look for a new set of less-flimsy pedals for the trail-a-bike, which we managed to find even though they are an odd size. We had talked about getting some ice cream but the storm suddenly broke on us so we rushed back to the cars to load up the bikes. Back at the cabin, we all dried off, showered, and dried off again. Then we returned to Crested Butte to fill our bellies at Donita's Cantina. We also walked around and looked at some of the shops, including the rock shop where we saw fossilized teeth of Carcharadon megalodon, an enormous prehistoric shark.

The evening wouldn't have been complete for the kids without a splash in the hot tub, so that's what happened when we got back to the cabin!

Crested Butte - Day 1

On Sunday, August 1, the Diddiwahs and the Scaqabouts were converging on Crested Butte, Colorado. Admittedly, the process was easier for us Diddiwahs, requiring less than 3 hours in the truck, while the Scaqabouts slogged on for nearly 3 days. But by Sunday morning, both families were closing in; we made car-to-car phone calls (when the mountains permitted reception) to share ETAs and coordinate a location to meet up. We thought we would meet at our rental cabin, but we arrived to find the cleaning crew still at work, so we all met at a park at the edge of Crested Butte. Then we headed into town to get some lunch.

We were surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find the main street closed to traffic and lined with tents and booths for an art festival. We had known about the event when we were planning our trip but we'd forgotten about it until we saw the crowds. Luckily we were able to get a table at Pitas in Paradise fairly quickly, and it was only a short eternity until our food arrived. After lunch, we walked leisurely back to our cars, taking time to look at some of the art.

We all went to the cabin and were able to get in. It was a pretty nice rental, a genuine log cabin that was clean and nicely furnished. Its yard was overgrown with wildflowers and small trees, bordered on one side with a shallow creek. The kids and dogs immediately gravitated towards the water while the adults brought suitcases and groceries in the cabins and sorted out who would be sleeping in each of the 3 bedrooms.

Happily, there was enough daylight left that we could go for a bike ride, so we headed back to town to ride the Lower Loop and Upper Lower Loop trails. Chris and I had scouted out these trails on the 4th of July weekend, and we thought it would be a good place for a family ride... and we were right. We parked beside Peanut Lake and -once the bikes were unloaded and shoes and helmets located - rode up a gravel road to the trails. Lower Loop is an easy trail with a section of narrow rocky singletrack near the beginning which didn't present any problem to Quinn, Abbey or our big red tandem pulling the trail-a-bike.


Further down the trail we came to a climb up and over some tree roots followed by a very rooty descent. Abbey navigated this quite well but she came to a screeching stop after the tricky part when she found herself up close and personal with a cow.


The trail meandered beside a creek, which always makes Utah happy. Amos was less interested in getting in the water. Lower Loop trail ends at a road, but we turned left onto that road and started climbing towards Upper Lower Loop. It's a fairly short climb but it's steep, and it proved a little challenging, especially to the flatlanders who hadn't had a chance to acclimate to the altitude... and to Chris and I, crawling along on a big bike with Cailan in tow. We took a break at the start of Upper Lower, reviving the kids with fruit twists and sport beans.

Upper Lower is very fun - it's a tight, narrow trail clinging to a steep hillside. It's mostly smooth, with some rocky sections and a few short, root-infested climbs in aspen groves. There are great views both up the valley towards big snowy peaks and down the valley towards town and Mt Crested Butte.


And then all the climbing pays off with a fun, curvy descent back to the Lower Loop trail. We encountered a few mud puddles along the way, and Cailan ended up "drizzled":


Later, back at the cabin, we enjoyed a dinner of bean burritos around the huge table in the sunroom. The kids all wanted to swim in the hot tub - the water temperature had been lowered to 96 degrees so even Cailan was able to get in and splash around, while the sun set and a late evening sprinkle went unnoticed.