Our first Bike Ride

The sun was shining and the wind calm this morning. As soon as the temps climbed out of the 20's, we set out to explore a road we checked out in the car on Saturday. It's actually about a twenty-five mile loop that starts from the end of Main Street in town, winds through the valley dotted with ranches until the pavement ends. What follows is a dirt road maintained by the Forest Service and used mostly by big, log trucks piled high with lodge pole pine. If you follow that road, eventually the chip and seal returns and the road ascends sharply to the top of a ridge where it again winds around through high, ranch pasture until it descends back to the valley floor and town. On our driving tour, we went one way on Saturday and the opposite way Sunday. We opted not to take the dirt road on the first outing since Larry had just washed 2,000 miles of road dirt from the little, red "towed." Sunday afternoon was sunny and beautiful and we drove in the opposite direction. Once again the pavement disappeared, but the road was wide, in mostly good condition and well-traveled. (But the car did get dirty again) At the point of descent, we started down and saw only lots of snow ahead so the car quickly went into reverse until we found a place to turn around! Getting stranded in the middle of nowhere did not seem like a fun activity.
Back to this morning. We rode about a mile and I realized that although this road appeared to be flat, we were steadily climbing. Coming from an Ohio altitude of 1,500' to 4,500' was something our lungs noticed when we ran on Saturday. Now we were climbing another 400 feet in just five miles. We stopped to take a few pictures and catch our breath. We also enjoyed what we think was a golden eagle looking for breakfast, soaring around and around over the fields. We had intended to ride as far as the FS road and turn around to get in twenty miles, but when we stopped for pictures, we noticed a change in the weather and decided heading back to town might be the smart thing to do. Both of us are looking forward to more stable weather when we can explore several other routes. Most of the traffic outside of town is on I-90. The roads are really wide and the drivers (few and far between) give us a wide berth and wave! Imagine that....


Things got really cloudy,windy and cold for about an hour and then the wind died down and out came the sun again!
We walked to the laundromat (boring and expensive) and then decided to go for a run to enjoy the weather before a snowstorm comes in tonight.

This shot doesn't clearly show how the clouds were coming in since sky and snow-covered mountains seem to meld into one gray mass. There are some big mountains in this shot...somewhere.