Day 5: Boulder–breakfast and a mountain ride
The next morning we launched for breakfast in Boulder. Boulder has the world’s best breakfasts! Well, I counted up 30 neat places to have breakfast there. I lived there for a couple years in the 80’s. It was neat to be back. Darn, what a whirlwind, though. I’d really wanted to stop in Denver, too, but M is already fretting about getting home in time for H’s school. Sigh. We don’t really have a schedule. Kinders don’t really need to make the first day of school. But. I had textbooks to deliver for prof’s to MSU! Yikes! And our friends in the Bay Area were leaving in a week and the kids really wanted to see each other. So we did have to keep moving to our main destinations. Breakfast in Boulder was one of them!
We went to my fave: mimosas and eggs on the porch of the main camp lodge in Chautauqua Park at the top of town, in the foothills overlooking everything else. Ahhh. The kids were great, the food was great. It was my first view of Boulder people in years. They look like models and movie stars, wheelers and dealers, coasters and sliders.
Actually, I’d started getting intimidated earlier in the morning as we left Denver. Everything is much more built up, sure. But there are also tons more public amenities and most of all: there are LOTS of people outside. I’ve never seen so many high-end road bikes and mt-bikes out on the road. Along with special parking lots and bikeways for them. And this is in Denver! Denver felt like Boulder to me. And it seemed superfit. All this go-go, professional stuff with all the development of bikeways just kind of threw me. A little goofy, I know, but there ya have it. Well, I’m not used to seeing any at all, really, other than a few people I know. And then Boulder was even more Boulder than Denver was, of course. (This is getting funny.) While we were having breakfast, people from town were coming and going by the score, to the hiking trails nearby, only not just for strolls, I guess. They had on performance-wear and camelback water systems. Well, fine.
My next plan was to do my favorite bike ride in town: a bit of the Boulder Creek path then on up through the ‘hoods to Flagstaff Mountain and ride up that supersteep 9 mile hill. We went down to the Pearl Street Mall area and Boulder Creek where I left the family for a couple hours. I went to check out the old library by the creek. It was gone. There’s now a new library on the other side of the creek. It’s a crystal cathedral with waterfall in the middle, circular in layout, with highspeed Net connections everywhere , with spiral staircase. Yowza. I was starting to get amenity overload.
Driving through town we’d seen the vast Boulder Community Recreation Center. It’s basically something like three times what an Olympic Training Center would be, with much new stuff added on. Whew! Then there was the lovely Creek scene itself. There were hundreds of diverse people outside. Bums, punks, hippies, backpackers, yoga types, martial artists, bike racers, inline dancers, cellphone people of every stripe, bicycle activists and commuters, trout fishermen, inner tubers, kids splashing, old ladies, groups of civic people meeting on lawns, a farmer’s market. My Lord! All in a lush, overgrown, green, tree-filled setting with crystal clear creek tumbling down through it. Packed with people playing, swimming, lolling, sitting, reading. Then as I rode along it, I’d see sections that looked wild and briary and kind of inaccessible and it looked like any woodsy creek. What a place. The Pearl Street Mall with its civic commercial space and the parallel Boulder Creek pathway corridor, with neighborhoods of small streets and small, older bungalows hidden in between in the warm mountain sun make a worldclass combination of something, that’s for sure. I mean, I still dream about it.
I sure was enjoying seeing the wide variety of bikes of all vintages, along with lots of older cars and motorcycles of all kinds, cruising around and stashed in yards many of which had plenty of character.
Time for Flagstaff.
I had the sense I had brought the wrong gears for my bike. A 24-tooth cog was my biggest, with 42-tooth chainring. In Missouri I’d already spent a lot of time in that gear. I thought I’d left the same gears on the bike since we’d visited Boulder 3 years ago. I’d find out for sure.
I started up Flagstaff and was immediately straining like I never had in my life. I’d never screwed up gear selection so badly. So much for rushing my packing. I needed a 28. Every 10 minutes I had to stop. Lots of racer dudes and dudettes went blasting on down past me. Then it got steeper. I started tacking across the road. Help, help. The heat, the heat. I could kind of turn the pedals and that was enough. I finally made it, swung around and started back down. Whoa, this is WAY too fast. I had to brake and lean so hard I almost skidded out just to make the turns. But any less and I was zooming off the road over the cliff. Catcha-22. I tried sitting up high but that didn’t help. My rims got boiling hot and my glued-on sewups got all juicy and wanted to slip right off the rims. I was bummin’. I had to stop a couple times and pour the rest of my water on the wheels.
I had lost the Dark Art of Descending. I used to be able to ride up that hill in 22 minutes. It took me 1 hour this time. I used to fly down it using the brakes maybe 4 times. Not today! You just have to be familiar with going down these hills. And I wasn’t anymore. And I just could not figure it out. That was kind of funny.
When I finally got down I went into town and found a bike shop that I know from the Net. I’d chatted various times with its owner in public discussions. I knew he ran just about the only high end road bike store in the US. So I found him and said Hi. He had lots of vintage bikes on display. He didn’t have a 28-tooth cog I could use on my old 80’s freehub set-up. “You’d have to file down the ramps on a new cog.” We talked bike books. The Tour de France ended on his TV. All us dudes there gabbed about the race. It was a fine shop.
Martha then went on her ride along the whole Creek path while I played in the creek with the kids and other wild kids and backpackers and tubers and fishermen.
We left town kind of late, after cruising through a few of my old ‘hoods and checking out the gloriously high quality stylish grocery store on North Broadway: the retro “Ideal.” (A lady in the lot said she liked my stickers.) Then we headed up the canyon to camp at Brainard Lake, the state park north of Nederland along the heavenly Peak to Peak Highway. Along the way we passed the lovely old Lion’s Head restaurant. That looks worth checking out sometime, for the steak-and-Manhattan-inclined. Brainard is a gorgeous, remote, undeveloped hiking area. Or it was. The sign said full when we got there in the dark.
Two more campgrounds along the highway were also full. Then we saw a sign that said “National Forest Access 2 miles” off on a dirt side road. We took it. We followed it to a rancher’s two-track, saw more signs, kept going. Went up and up. It got rocky, a sign said one mile to something that seemed public. Then we saw a couple other cars catching up to us. Finally we pulled off on a spur and they went into a woods below us. Did we know where we were? Ha. I wondered what those folks were up to. But didn’t get nervous. We camped. Woke up in a heavenly high mountain foresty meadow of aspen and flowers. Above and below us through the trees we saw several other car campers and their tents.
