Steph's Rocky Mountain Test Ride

Hello! I'm getting excited for and mildly terrified of this tour thing we have planned. Some of my terror was slightly alleviated by a brief test ride I did yesterday with my bike loaded up with gear. The 520 looked like this:

Stuff adding weight to my past experience of this bike included fenders, a new front rack (Surly Nice), a new handlebar bag, sleeping bag, tent, and panniers (containing sleeping pad, 2L of water in an MSR bladder, enough food to fill a small dry sack, my Primus OmniFuel stove, 1L of white gas, cookware, first aid / emergency kit, enough clothes to fill a medium dry sack, toiletries, etc.) Needless to say it was very heavy, barely liftable.

I've never ridden with weight in the front, so that took some getting used to. Hyper-balancing the weight in the front seems to be much more important than in the rear, so I had to do some periodic rearranging to minimize wobbliness. I only went 13.5 miles, from Michael's cabin to Allenspark, and back, gaining 1530' for the round trip. I averaged 9.4 mph, which is pretty slow, but I guess that's acceptable given the weight, the climbing (which was really difficult and incredibly slow), and the altitude (max 9400'). If we can come close to that pace when we're on the move during the tour, we should be more than fine on time. Also hopefully it'll get easier as we go!

Trading the Rockies (e.g. Mt. Meeker, above) for the Sierras and Cascades is bittersweet. But mostly sweet, as I'm sure I'll be back in CO soon and often.

:)

Steph