After a great celebration of Carrie’s birthday in town:
We did the work week, kept up with kiddos busy schedules, and then left the kids behind and went up to Crested Butte. We drove the EV (Nissan Leaf) up and just stopped in Alamosa to recharge – time for a good bike ride exploring nice trails along the Rio Grande:
Then back on the road – we stopped in Gunnison. Great to charge up a little – and even better, catch up with Curt and Alice over delicious dinner downtown!
Made it into Crested Butte, found our (great! super convenient – one block from Camp4 Coffee), unpacked, got the EV over to the (great! but slow) charger for an overnight charge up, and went back to the AirBnB. We feel happy to be here!
Up early, EV charged, Camp4 Coffee, then rode my road bike up from town to the Ski Hill. A good warm up to sign up and get in line for the start of Outerbike! Three days of unlimited lift rides, unlimited demo bikes, lunches, happy hours, and loads of bike nerds! What fun!!
First bike – a sweet Canfield Jedi. No dropper, small cluster of gears – pure downhiller. This was tons of fun.
Instead of my usual approach of trying to explore all over the mountain and try every trail, I decided to ride each demo bike on the same few runs to get a good comparison/feel for each. I did Frequency on every bike, usually Lower Avery. I enjoyed upper Avery, Luge, and the “back around” cruiser route of Primer then Painter Boy / Teaser / Awakening. Too much fun.
Bike #2 was the Yeti SB 160. Fun bike – this is the one I realized I like the Pivot suspension geometry that spreads out the bike rather than compressing the bike. Both bike #1 and #2 felt “small”/tight (and I was on a L that fit correctly) – figured out why talking with other bike nerds. The Yeti:
Met Carrie for lunch, then bike #3, the Fezzari La Sal Peak. This was my favorite bike of the day. Really sweet ride:
Day 1 of riding in the books. Meet Carrie for Happy Hour, enjoy the scene, sad we didn’t win any of the awesome raffle prizes.
Then ride our bikes (down!) back into town, hunger strikes so we go to Secret Stash Pizza – the crack fries are out of this world as always and the pizza was awesome.
What a great birthday celebration for us both – and this is only day 1 of 3 for Outerbike!