Another Waterton Bike Ride

Saturday, we loaded our mountain bikes on the back of our mini-van and took them to Waterton Canyon. You may remember Waterton Canyon from such posts as Biking with the Sheep. In fact, I've just realized that I blog about it enough that I might as well have a Sheppy's Blog: Waterton Canyon "label". You can follow that link to see all our adventures in this canyon (including this blog post).

As a reminder, Waterton Canyon is the beginning of the 480 mile Colorado Trail. The canyon is a good place to take the kids riding.  It is off-road, but nice and wide. It is also very scenic, with access to the South Platte river and rocks to climb. It only has a slight elevation gain, so it is pretty easy without being too simple.

The river is certainly up compared to most (probably all) of the pictures you've seen on this blog. We've had a good snowy winter in the mountains plus a pretty wet spring so far.

Biking with the Sheep

It was about a year ago when I reported that my youngest son had finally finished learning to ride his bike. Hard to believe it has only been a year. Very soon after that, he started asking me to get him a mountain bike. The little one-speed bike apparently was not doing it for him. He wanted a bike with multiple gears and hand brakes like the rest of the family. He always enjoyed riding his little bike, but thought it could be better.

The boy turned 8 on Friday, and we finally got him that mountain bike. He loves it and was very excited to try it out. We made the mistake of giving it to him very close to dinner time, and it took us awhile to get him back to the house to eat.

We let him decide what our family Saturday activity would be. He picked (not surprisingly) to go on a bike ride.

Our Weekend

Today is election day. It looks to me that Obama will win. That is a shame, but I'll get over it. Hopefully we all will.

I do not completely agree with those who make the call for everyone to go out and vote. It is a right, a privilege, and a responsibility, but in my opinion, making an uninformed vote is worse than not voting at all. If you are not going to take the time to understand what you are voting for, stay home. Just my opinion.

And, personally, with mail-in ballets an option, I do not understand why anyone would go to the polls at all. It just seems so inconvenient to stand in line and have to fill out the ballet at a certain place at a certain time. If you have the opportunity to fill out the ballet in the comfort of your own home with a laptop and the internet in front of you at your own time an pace, I do not understand why you would not take advantage of that option.

Anyway, we have had unusually mild weather lately. This weekend was very nice. Almost what you would call hot. Considering that it is November, absolutely I would say it was very warm out.

Saturday, we decided to go for a bike ride. Tyler decided he would like to ride up Waterton Canyon. Waterton Canyon is a very popular place to start mountain biking. It is the beginning of the Colorado Trail which runs almost 500 miles across the whole state. The first 8 miles or so go up the Waterton Canyon on a nice wide trail along the Platte river. For the most part, it is pretty flat or at least only a slight uphill grade. Once you get past the first 8 miles, it becomes a single track and one of my favorite mountain biking trails.

But, the wide, only slight-uphill part of the trail is part that we were obviously going for. And, considering what a rookie Tyler is at bike riding, he did a really good job. We made it a bit past the 3-mile mark, so the round-trip was a little longer than 6 miles. Tyler was very proud of himself for making the ride, and quite frankly, so were Mommy and Daddy. Even Connor was pretty impressed.

And, it was very very fun.

On Sunday, we raked leaves. Tyler and Connor were actually very helpful, especially the bagging part. I actually do not mind the raking part. I do not like bagging all that much, but this time I had my two helpers doing most of that. Tracy helped out a bit as well, and not just with the camera. We all had fun raking and bagging.

Of course, half of the leaves are still in our trees, so we will have the opportunity to do this a few more times.

It was a great weekend.

Mountain Biking

Yesterday, I went mountain biking. I have been a couple times this year, but before this summer, it has been years since I've actually ridden my mountain bike on anything remotely resembling a mountain biking trail.

I went up the old standard Waterton Canyon which after about 7 miles hooks up with the Colorado Trail. Yes, Waterton Canyon is the place we take Tyler quite a bit, but we just take him on the first part of the trail.


Surprisingly enough, even though I have not been mountain biking for so long, I got up to the spot pictured above in about the amount of time it took me years ago when I actually was in Mountain Biking shape. I was tired as heck with the climb, but I got there without having to stop. I did however just head back down the trail from that point rather than doing a loop that "real" mountain bikers would have done. I hope to do the loop next week sometime.

On the way back down the canyon, I "ran into" the herd of big-horn sheep that lives in that area. It has been a real long time since I've seen them, so it was pretty amazing to come so close (they were on the trail itself). It is downright amazing that I had decided to bring the camera, because usually my luck is not that great.

Actually, the only reason I brought the camera was that I wanted to take a picture of the valley on the other side of the switchbacks (the first photo in this blog). I think that spot ranks up there with some of the most beautiful views I have seen in Colorado, and I wanted the shot to put on one of my beer labels.

Anyway, it was nice to do some mountain biking again. I need to make sure I get out some more.

Bike Ride

We didn't have the best Memorial Day Weekend weather. It is always nice to get rain, but it really would have been nice to get more sun on the long weekend.

We did go for a bike ride up Waterton Canyon on Saturday. Waterton is about a 20 minute drive for us. It is basically the start of the Colorado Trail, so I guess we really could have biked 500 miles, but Tyler is not really ready for single tracks, so we stay on the first part of the trail.

Tracy really likes biking here because it is a really wide bike trail for about the first 7 miles (after which comes the single track up into the mountains), and although it is definitely a slight elevation gain, for the most part it feels pretty flat until you start to head back and realize it is a much easier ride heading back out.

Tyler really likes the trail, because it is the only place he has riden that has clearly visible mile markers to let him know how far he has gone. I think he also appreciates the wide trail and the mostly-flat ride. And, I think he really likes the way he can go faster back out of the Canyon.


Connor doesn't much care about any of that. He just rides in the trailer talking to his stuffed Gorilla, and enjoying himself when we stop.

Tyler's previous bike - riding record was to mile-marker 3, which means he did 6 miles. Saturday, he made it 5 miles in and 5 miles out to give him (are you ready for this?) 10 total miles. 10 miles is pretty good for a boy of 7.



That first picture was a shelter we stopped at for lunch. Tyler and Connor thought is was cool that its name was "Rattlesnake", but we did not see any snakes close by. The second picture is me and the boys on a little side trail we walked up after lunch.

And, here we all are on a bridge about 4 and a half miles from the start of the trail. The kids liked dropping rocks through a little drainage hole in the bridge and watching them drop to the water.

So, this was the only out-doorsy type thing we did this weekend. Usually we are camping Memorial Day weekend, but Daddy kept putting off making a reservation until nothing was left. Considering all the rain, I am glad we did not end up going camping. It should be nicer this coming weekend.

Here is a little picture of Mommy and Daddy snowshoeing up in Estes park a couple of weeks ago. It doesn't really go with this blog, but I meant to post it back around the time we went on our kidless weekend getaway, and just never got around to it.

Some summer photos

Just some interesting photos I have sitting around. No particular theme. No real order to them.

Enjoy.

When the mighty Blackhawks played the evil Minnesota Wild, my nephew thought it would be a good idea to bet me an ice cream cone on the winner of the series. The wager went better for me than for him. I collected when we saw each other in South Dakota.

Riding in the November Cold

I cycled over 110 miles in the cold this weekend. Each day I started early in the morning with the temperatures close to 20F.

Had to rely on my winter "kit" to keep me warm, and even so, my fingers and toes got cold.

But, even so, the rides were fun.

I passed my #5000MilesIn2022 goal early in October, and am now working on completing the #10Everestsin2022 goal.

Sunday I got in another Metric Century to keep my #MetricCenturyEveryMonth goal alive.

According to Strava, I only need about 8000 feet to get to 29,032 for the year. 

Will Drink in May

 Not too long ago, I facebook "liked" SheppyBrew's Helles in a Hand Bock-sket with the comment:

Kegging my Helles in a Hand Bock-sket #homebrew beautiful gold beer 7.5 ish abv. Will drink in May.

One of my facebook friends commented:

I like "Will drink in May" - I know what you mean but it sounds so decisive. Like an event, or a bumper sticker

Kinda like "will work for food," but not sad and needy.

Well, as you may remember (but quite likely don't), the SheppyBrew Brewery does have official brewery merchandise that we sell on Zazzle. Not very many people have ordered from the store (I can count them on one finger), but it is there in case the brewery ever gets fans who might want a hat or a mug or a stein or something else that says SheppyBrew on it.

Geocaching Bike Ride

My son making pancakes

It was a glorious spring weekend day this past Saturday. The kids told their mom that they would like to go on  a bike ride. Connor said he didn't want to go to the Cowboy Playground and didn't want to do the Waterton Canyon trail again. He wanted to go on a new bike ride. 

I decided to introduce the boys to the Highland Canal path. The Highland Canal is one of the Denver Metro's biggest bike trails. It runs from south of C470 up to Aurora, snaking along quite a bit. Depending on where I try to get the information, the total distance is anywhere from 48 miles to 71 miles.

Follow this link and you can see a map: http://www.denvermetrotrails.com/maps/highline%20canal%20trail.html

Of course the total distance does not matter that much. My wife and kids were not going to ride the whole thing.

I picked a little 7 mile section running from Writers Vista Park in Littleton to deKoevend Park in Centennial. Both these parks are right on the bike path.

Father's Day Weekend

Apparently some fathers spend Fathers' Day away from (as a break from) their kids. This seems like a really weird concept to me. My fathers' days are always full of activities with the kids.

This year, the boys decided they wanted to take me camping for fathers' day weekend.

At first, Mommy was going to be in charge of reserving the campsite, but would not be coming along. At some point the boys decided she should come with us so she could be in charge of getting us to the actual Fathers' Day activity.

I am glad they decided to bring her along. Fathers' Day would have been too much work without her.

The campsite that Mommy reserved was in the Kenosha Pass campground, which is at 10,000 feet is about an hour and a half drive from our house. Tracy was a bit concerned as we were driving there Friday night that it would be too cold up that high. I, of course, scoffed at such an idea.

The campground itself has undergone tree-clearing recently. A bunch of the pine trees were victims of the dreaded pine beetle epidemic. The nice thing about the tree-clearing effort is that it resulted in a bunch of free firewood, so we were able to have bigger, longer lasting campfires than we usually allow ourselves. This area happens to have lots of aspen trees, so the cleared out trees didn't necessarily make the area look as bare as an it could have. 

Saturday morning after cleaning up from breakfast, we packed up a lunch and started hiking the Colorado Trail. For those of you who don't know, the Colorado Trail runs about 500 miles from Waterton Canyon South of Denver to Durango. The trail passes over Kenosha Pass, and practically goes through the campground.

Before we could start our hike, we (of course) had to climb some of the rocks by the campground. Dad told the kids there would be plenty of rocks to climb on the hike.

Turns out that Dad lied. There were no good climbing rocks along the portion of the trail on which we hiked.

We did come across a couple of shelters built out of sticks along the trail. The most impressive one is the one to the right here. Someone obviously spent a bunch of time building this shelter.

We saw some mountain bikers and backpackers along the trail. Both the boys tell me they want to go backpacking soon. I am glad to hear that, but I am a bit skeptical that they will actually enjoy backpacking once they are actually doing it.

They insist they want to, though, so I will try to accommodate the request.

It was a nice sunny day. It also wasn't overly hot. The perfect day for a hike. The views were very nice too.

We had a nice picnic lunch along the trail.

Then, we headed back to the campsite to relax for awhile in the afternoon until supper time. Mommy even played her guitar for a bit.

We had another great big campfire at night with the free firewood lying around.

Usually on Fathers' Day, I get breakfast in bed. This is impractical in the tent, but my wife did make us pancakes and sausage.

I did have to help pack up the camp on my "special" day, but at least I didn't have to do dishes.

After packing up the camp, for my official Fathers' Day activity, we headed over to Fairplay Colorado to go to South Park City.

South Park City is basically a restored 1880's mining town. Its buildings were relocated from various ghost towns all over Colorado.

We went on the self-guided tour through the town and its buildings. It was very interesting and we all had a good time.

There was a recreation of a mine.

There was a train. The kids had fun climbing on the locomotive and the caboose.

The school house was a hit.

We got to go into an old-town bank that had been relocated from Alma, Colorado.

The whole camping trip and ghost town tour made for a great Fathers' Day weekend. The boys and their Mom did a great job setting everything up, and I had a wonderful time.

I guess I am under some pressure to help the boys come up with what to do next Mothers' Day.

1000 Mile Mild

As I shared in #GCCUSA 2019 Great Cycle Challenge, I'm doing the Great Cycle Challenge again this year.

Since the blog post, I raised my riding goal to 1000 miles.

I wanted to brew this weekend, and I thought it would be fun to make a beer commemorating this challenge.

I thought it should be low alcohol, and came up with a recipe for a English Mild.

1000 Mile Mild

1000 miles is a lot of bike riding for me to accomplish in a month, and in order to have a chance to complete the goal, I'm going to have to be pretty aggressive.

Of course, I wanted to get started out strong. The month started off on this past weekend, and I made it my goal to hit 100 miles by Sunday night.

April 2013 Blogging

April did not beat the page-view record on this blog, but it did end up in 2nd place all-time behind March. I think this is more reasonable behavior than the steady rise the blog had from May of 2011 through January of this year. Some months should be up some should be down.

Since I know that the curiosity is killing you (yeah, right) the top 10 most viewed posts in April are: