Hermosa Creek

Yesterday’s ride was the famous Hermosa Creek ride, just north of Durango. Howie and I had also done this one when we were here about 5 years ago. The trick to this ride is it’s a shuttle, that is you drop one car at the bottom and drive up to the top. We had talked to another guy here at the RV park, Scott, that was interested in doing this with us and had already talked to a guy, Phil, at one of the bike shops in town about doing it as well. We met Phil at the shuttle drop point and head up the mountain. Phil is just a young pup, 22, originally from New Hampshire but has lived here for 4 years and talks like he’s a surfer dude from southern California. He also rides a single speed. We were not worried about him slowing us down. The ride starts in a large meadow at about 8850 feet. The first five miles is a pretty fast ride along the creek on a very old double track road bed. Basically the only thing to slow you down are some very large mud puddles that don’t slow everybody down, you can tell by looking at jerseys at the end who slows and who doesn’t. At about the 5 mile point we cross the creek on a nice bridge.

The track narrows a bit for another couple miles then turns to true bench cut single track running above the creek basically for the rest of the 20 miles. This was the first time on any sort of “exposed” single track for Scott and had him a little wigged out at first but with a little encouragement and some time getting used to it, he was doing really well by the end. We were down as far as 7500 feet before the last climb out up to about 8000 where the trail ended and we cruised down the dirt then paved road to the shuttle vehicle three and half hours later. Even with the shuttle we still did about 1500 feet of climbing. Conveniently enough there was a pizza shop right there that actually cooked your pizza before giving it to ya, so Pooh, princess and I chowed down on some while we waited for the truck to return, probably took them an hour. It was at least as great as Howie and I remembered and actually a fair piece easier, I know in my case its because im in much better shape now than 5 years ago. Looks like we may be hooking up with Phil for a big shuttle ride on Friday.

Princess and Pooh had picked up some innertubes the day before and wanted to go float the river, so papa bear took them down into town and dropped them off, the plan being we would pick them up on our way to go into town for dinner a few hours later. We found a parking spot a block or so from the street our Mexican place was on and walked to the street. We were only a couple blocks from one end of town so the odds were that the place was to our right, more into town so we headed that way. After 6 or 8 blocks we pretty much ran outta the retail district, asked a local and he said, yea, its at the other end of town, we should have gone left. No worries, it was a beautiful evening so we headed back and sure enough, there was Gazpacho’s. Really good food.

Today is a day off, more river floating and since we had time in the morning, Pooh made us all really good French toast.