Alderfer Three Sisters

Well, it's now June 30th (happy birthday, Jill), and most of our belongings are still in Lansing, MI, waiting for North American Van Lines to find a driver to pick them up and deliver them to us. Currently, we're expecting delivery on July 9th, which will be about two weeks later than the original delivery date. So we sleep on the floor and cook with one pan. It's a good thing we brought our bikes with us! Too bad we didn't bring the big green leather sofa!

In the computer game, Plants vs. Zombies, there are some zombies that walk with an open newspaper, wearing a sport coat, tie, and boxer shorts. Cindy says they remind her of me! Can you believe that? We don't even get the paper!

After a week of intensive mountain biking boot camp, in which we got out for a short neighborhood ride and/or run nearly every evening, we decided to give the mountain biking-in-the-mountains thing another go. Looking for some trails that would give us a nice mix of climbing and descending, without too much total elevation gain, we thought the Alderfer/Three Sisters Park seemed ideal. I rode here previously and wrote it up here. This park is really nice, with lots of trails of varying length and difficulty, all winding around among the classic Front Range rocks and boulders.

Click here to see the map of our route.

The little graphic below shows our speed and elevation by distance. We started with a pretty tough ascent, climbing from 7500 to 8200 ft in the first 2.5 miles. This was challenging for Cindy and the kids, but not excessively so. We made it up with the only casualty being a minor spill that Abbey took while riding through a rocky dip at a water bar right near the very top. The descent through mile 5 was fast and fun, but this time we rode with speed and control, in contrast to Quinn's descent last weekend!

Quinn did much better this week on the climbs, in part because we swapped the flat pedals that were on his Santa Cruz for the SPD 'clipless' pedals that he'd used on his Scott for the last few years. Last weekend, he'd had some trouble keeping his feet optimally placed on his pedals, which I think contributed to his struggles with the climbs. Obviously, being clipped to the pedals really helps with foot placement, and it makes it a little easier to pedal smoothly up hill. Quinn was immediately comfortable in the clipless pedals again, and I think they helped him out on this ride. He took one spill: riding up a gentle hill, with me right behind him, he took one hand off the bar for a few seconds, which he often does, but then his front wheel hit some sand and turned sharply. He went down pretty hard, but was mostly unharmed and mostly unfazed.

In the photo below, Abbey is following Quinn through a quick, rocky, downhill trail. Abbey is the only one of us riding a hard tail, about which she doesn't fail to remind us occasionally. She has gotten quite strong this spring and I never really have to worry about whether she's keeping up. Cindy was typically bringing up the rear, and feeling the pressure to clean the technical sections that the kids went through unscathed.

After a very steep, but short climb at mile 5, there is really nice mile of downhill that has some large rock slabs to ride over. The slaps are not steep enough to cause any trouble, but when approaching them it's not easy to see how steep they are, so they can be a little scary. Once again, Quinn was in such a hurry that I had to make him stop so I could get ahead to get some pictures.

With at least 1500 feet of climbing, very coarsely measured, and 9 miles total distance, this was a great ride. Great scenery and great trails. We all finished with big smiles, and lots of statements about what an awesome, fun ride it was, and how much we'd all like to do it again. I certainly can't complain about that.

First Ride

On June 19, 2012, we loaded nearly everything we owned into a couple of big trucks and left Michigan. Most of our stuff went into a commercial van lines moving truck (loaded by some large, sweaty movers), but some of it, mostly the bicycles, went into a Uhaul truck that we loaded ourselves and drove to Colorado. Q rode in the Uhaul with me, while Cindy, Abbey, and Amos rode in the our little red Vibe. The drive was windy and long, but uneventful. We spent a couple of nights in hotels on the way, first in Michigan City, MI, then in Lincoln, NE. On Thursday, June 21, we arrived at our new home in Centennial, CO.

As soon as we unloaded the truck, we headed for the mountains. Well, almost. On Sunday, June 24, we made the relatively short trek to Mt. Falcon Park to see how well Cindy and the kids had acclimated after three days in Colorado. Mt. Falcon Park was one of the places in the state that wasn't on fire.

One way to do Mt. Falcon, is to start on the east side and climb up toward the west, as I had done a couple of months ago, and described here. We opted for a more newcomer-friendly option, starting on the west where there is a parking lot near the top of the park. It was a very nice ridgeline ride on a mostly smooth trail covered in a course gravel. But it was hot. The high in Denver that day was over 100 F. We started early, but it still scorching hot, even at 8,000 ft.

We visited the remains of Walker's cabin and the spot that he had selected for a Presidential retreat (that one didn't work out).

We also rode the Parmalee Trail, a single-track loop that extends out and down and back up from the ridge-line trail. It was a rather steep and challenging trail; not everyone in our family rode all of it, but Quinn did his best to fly through it like an experienced downhiller. I had to scold him for getting ahead of us. Really, I just wished I could have seen him ride it. How did he get across those huge drops and 8-inch thick water bar logs at 20 mph?

Who looks the most exhausted?

The climb back from up Parmalee and to the parking lot was a different story. Quinn was hot and discouraged by the long, slow uphill grind. The girls made it back to the top much more quickly than Quinn and me.

It was great first ride, with nice scenery and a not-too-challenging trail. After Quinn's struggle with the climb, I was a little worried about how this mountain biking idea was going to go for us. I was thinking that the big black tandem might be seeing a lot more miles than the singles. Of course, it was our first time out, and we were at 8,000 ft only a few days after leaving Michigan. More time and more training would be needed. Family mountain biking boot camp had begun!

Abbey's Barcelona

Here's Abbey performing her version of Barcelona, by Now The Rabbit Has The Gun.

Sorry about the shaky video... you might want to just close your eyes and listen.

Updated Figures

I couldn't stay away from it...

I correctly assigned a date-time class to the time data, and from there it was easy. The upper figure depicts elevation and speed plotted against elapsed time as before, but now the time axis is uniform with respect to time. In both figures I have now drawn lines instead just showing individual data points, which gives them a cleaner look.   

Alderfer - Three Sisters & Distance Calculation

Our transition from Michigan to Colorado is almost complete. Two weeks from now, the whole of scaq will be in Colorado together. Together again. I am so happy to be reaching this point. There will be some lingering financial issues related to the pending sale of the home in Michigan, perhaps cause for severe stress, but at least our family will be together again! And in the West again.

For the first day of my last weekend alone in Colorado, I headed out to the Jefferson County Open Space Park, Alderfer/Three Sisters for a bit of mountain biking -- of course. The forecast high for Denver was 93 degrees F, so I wanted to get out early. But I also value my sleep, so I found a good balance and left the house a little before 7 a.m. On the trail by 8 a.m., I was not the first rider out, but there weren't many in front of me. And I passed most of them on the first big climb. :)

I used my Google Android app, My Tracks, to log my route again. Here's a link to a Google map created from my GPS log: Click Here! 

And here's something really cool. Recall that in the previous post I had used R to create a figure showing my elevation and speed based on the data output from the My Tracks log. Recall also that I wished I could have used distance rather than elapsed time on the x-axis, but the My Tracks data output only included latitude and longitude for each point; it did not include a distance calculation. Here's the analogous figure for today's ride, with elapsed time on the x-axis. Also, I realized that R has treated the time data as categorical (as a 'factor') rather than numeric, so the x-axis is not uniform with respect to time.

So this afternoon, I decided it would be fun and useful to see if I could calculate the distance based on the coordinate data. This may occasionally come in handy for me at work, and it was easier than I'd expected. In the R package called Fossil, there is a function that uses the haversine formula to calculate distance between two points on a big sphere. I was sort of thinking I was going to have to write my own function, which would have been fun, but  Matthew Vavrek had already done it for me! All I had to do was write a few lines of code to calculate the distance between each point (there were almost 3000 of them), convert the values from kilometers to feet, and make the list cumulative. It was remarkably simple, and the distance values match my bike computer to 0.1 miles! Of course, the two graphs don't really look much different.

Alright, enough talk about numbers!

The ride was nice. The first few miles made for quite a climb, but the trail was not particularly challenging in a rock-crawling technical sense, aside from a few tricky Front Range switchbacks. And oh, but that first big descent was really nice! My braking fingers got pretty tired and my rotors must have been roasting, but I'm pretty sure my Nickel was grinning from grip to grip.

The picture below was taken roughly half-way through the big climb. This park is a little further into the mountains that some trails I've written about here, and the elevation is a little higher, so it had a real Rocky Mountains feel to it.

Ya' gotta like rocks!

There were some nice views out across the town of Evergreen. The Nickel asked if I would be kind enough to take its picture. Tourists!

If you look back at my GPS log, and zoom on the map in the satellite view with 3D terrain, you'll see the rock outcrops that comprise the Three Sisters. Very cool. I took the picture below on the way up towards the Three Sisters from the east. I had actually intended to come up from the west, over the saddle between two of the sisters, and down toward the east, but I ended up on the wrong trail at one point and didn't figure it out in time. Once I did figure it out, I had come too far east, but I didn't want to miss the most challenging section of trail going over that saddle, so I went up from the east and then back down the way I had come. There were some sections on the Three Sisters Trail that I could not ascend, but I rode down most of them.

At one of those scenic stops along a rock outcrop, I came across the little guy below having a snack. Perhaps I should say he came across me. This was about the time that I was beginning to suspect I'd taken a wrong turn, so I was quietly sitting on rock with my big map out trying to determine where I was and where I should go next. I don't carry a 500mm lens when I'm mountain biking -- or at any other time -- so a little enhanced scenic was the best I could do. I was also shaking from the intensity of the climb to reach this point!

So, it was fun. A pleasant, moderately easy, 12-mile ride, with a few short, really challenging segments. We can add this park to the list that we'll be able to do with Cindy and the kids. Maybe not that first big climb, at least not immediately, but many other trails in the park are easy to intermediate in difficulty and could be just about right for their recently transplanted legs and lungs.

I'm still thinking about trying to convert the elapsed time to seconds, and getting R to recognize it as numeric, and then recreating the plot. I'm addicted to R.