In May of 2021 my wife and I took a trip to Colorado and Utah. The vacation had been planned for 2020, but didn’t happen for obvious reasons. We flew into Denver, picked up our rental Jeep Wrangler and headed west. I was amazed by the growth around the airport. The last time I was there, with my son, it was out in the middle of nowhere without much in the way of infrastructure. It is still a 100 miles from the city, but there are tons of hotels and everything associated with an airport.
I’m guessing it has been thirty years or more since I rode my bike up and down the mountains with the ‘amigos’, Bill and Gordie. Back then we didn’t think it was beyond our capabilities, or extremely dangerous. We would change our gearing from what we used on the flat roads of the Midwest, and we learned to climb at a steady pace and not go too deep into oxygen debt. For me the bigger challenge was descending. I’m taller than most cyclists and that’s a disadvantage. I have a higher center of gravity. It’s easy to reach speeds of 60 mph on some of the steeper descents. No big deal in a car with four large wheels to grip the road, but the tires on our racing cycles were only 18-20 millimeters wide. And there are no straight roads in the mountains.
I was surprised by how many cyclists we encountered this year in the National Parks and National Monuments. We would watch them struggling up the steep grades, and I would wonder if they knew how much climbing they faced. The scenic roads in the parks are rather congested, and I think that’s why Bill, Gordie and I preferred to avoid them. Even on other mountain roads we would see cyclists turning the pedals at an impossibly slow cadence, working their way up the grade inch by inch. I saw looks of agony, but also of joy, as they faced their challenge.
My days of riding bikes are behind me, and have been for several years. I find it difficult to believe that many years ago, I climbed some of those same steep mountains. One agonizing pedal stroke after another just to experience the thrill of reaching the summit and flying down the other side. I remember Gordie saying the toughest bike ride he ever did was the road to the top of Mt. Evans. The paved road, if you can call it that, to the summit is the highest one in the country – and the fifth highest in the world. It ascends to over 14,000 feet and is only open in the summer. He quickly added the second toughest ride was the descent of the same mountain.
I don’t fear heights, but edges terrify me. I could ride for miles at an altitude of over 10,000 feet without any qualms if the road was on top of a plateau or mesa. Put that same road on the side of a mountain with vertical drops on the edge, and my courage is less than the Cowardly Lion’s. I would concentrate on the road and dared not look at the beautiful scenery only a few feet away. Growing up in Illinois didn’t offer the same amount of climbing as Colorado. I’m not saying there aren’t challenging hills in the Midwest, but I don’t know of any that go on for fifteen or twenty miles.
Since I’m older, and slightly wiser, I have more respect for the cyclists who were challenging the mountains this year. Maybe I feel more pride in my accomplishments of years ago.