For the past 5 years, we've done a New Year's Day ride. We take the bike path along C470 and stop in to many of the breweries along the way. In Colorado, January 1 can be 50 degrees and sunny or it can be a brutal winter day. One year we made it about 25 miles and hit 6 breweries. 1/1/19 was winter. And one of the roughest. New Year's Eve was frigid all day, 5 degrees and snowed all day and into the night. We woke up to 11 degrees and about 4" of snow. We were meeting at 10:30am for an 11am start to hit Halfpenny Brewing at noon. I set out all the stuff I wore just to try to stay warm. Upper Body
Feeling like Randy from a Christmas story. I don't have a fatbike, and the ice ruled out the CX bike. I decided to ride my mountain bike. A BH Lynx 4.8. Earlier this summer, I put Hutchinson Squale 2.35 tubeless tires on it, and figured that would be enough of a footprint. ![]() One new addition to our casual rides has been the JBL Clip 2 speaker. Having tunes makes things just a bit better. Here's a link to our Spotify playlist that day. The cold was absolutely punishing. Never rose above 15 degrees. The bike path was plowed and an easy ride, but any underpass / tunnel - and there were several - had thick ice on entry and exit. We had a few crashes. A flat tire killed most of our body heat.
Then, the sidewalks along Colorado were buried under the snowfall and the splash from the plows - wet, mashed tater snow - about 6 inches. Just a slog. I don't have any ride pictures - between not wanting to deglove and the dicey conditions - the phone stayed away. The breweries we hit were:
We rolled out at 11am, and arrived back at Grist as the sun was going down over the Denver foothills - about 430pm. As we sat at Grist, we felt like we had been skiing all day. Just wiped. But a great start to 2019.
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AuthorThoughts and hopefully inspirations from the Warmfront. Archives
February 2020
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