Day 33 – Salida to Gunnison

Well, we made it out of Salida, but I have a feeling we’ll be back. 😉

After my issues during the ride yesterday I decided to pass on climbing up Monarch Pass.. 5k’ of climbing didn’t sound like my cup of tea. JP, however, was on the road early and took a shot at the mountain. He made it up about half way which is pretty damn awesome… I think that’s his longest straight climb ever, and a hell of an effort to finish above 9k’. He SAG’d up to the top of the pass, which, coincidentally, is on the Continental Divide.

JP cruised down the backside of the pass on his bike and continued on until mile 44. A fantastic ride given how much effort it took in the first few hours to work up the Pass.

Meanwhile, Heidi, the kids, and I were enjoying breakfast in Salida. We finished up and started to head out of town. On a lark, I took a turn in to a neighborhood to check out what neighborhoods in this area actually looked like. After driving around for a few minutes, we hit the road again… but rather than going over the pass, we went back to Salida… and walked in to a ReMax office. No, we didn’t buy a home, but we spent a fair bit of time talking to the agent about the area, schools, weather, etc. Safe to say we’ll be heading back to Salida in the future to keep scoping things out.

We drove up the pass and stopped at the Divide as well. There were some amazing views from up there, but it’s really hard to capture how impressive it is with a camera. Here’s an attempt.

The mountains on the backside of the pass are quite different than the east side. More rolling, more green. But still very mountainous (yes, we can start the East Coast vs West Coast mountain argument now).

We stopped at the bottom of the pass in Sargents. After some thought, I decided to jump on my bike and ride in to Gunnison to see how I felt. I’m glad I did because it was a totally different experience than the day before. I seem to have shaken off whatever I had going on and pedaled in the last 32 miles in to town. Now, granted, I lost 750′ in elevation over that stretch so it wasn’t exactly a difficult road. I did, however, have a headwind so it wasn’t crazy easy 😉

Gunnison is a nice town. A lot of bikes, but not as many as Salida. It has more of a “western” feel to it; the big rodeo just finished up last week apparently. Also, there are a LOT of RV’s here. I mean, the streets are lined with them.

We had a great dinner at an asian fusion type place here in town. So far the food in Colorado has been the best we’ve had the entire trip. Plus they had Alaskan Amber on tap at the place we ate at, so Heidi was in heaven.

Tomorrow is our rest day. “when in Rome, do as…” so tomorrow we’re going out fly fishing on the Gunnison River. We picked up a couple of fly rods from a local outfitter. We also picked up fishing licenses for Heidi and I… which was harder than you’d think because apparently there was a power failure at the company in Tennesse that handles the licensing for the state of Colorado. … yeah, the woman at the Department of Wildlife was a little miffed about that. But we’re good to go and know where we’re going to fish tomorrow. I’ve done a little fly fishing, Heidi has fly fished once, and the boys never have. This should be interesting.

Until tomorrow.