New Year's day - ice station zebra ride

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.

All the stuff I wore for the ride.

I set out all the stuff I wore just to try to stay warm.

Upper Body

• Giro ski helmet
• Helmet liner
• Ski goggles
• Neck tube
• Ski balm on the cheeks and nose
• Thin baselayer turtleneck
• Thicker baselayer
• Longsleeve cycling jersey
• Thermal cycling jacket
• Warmfront Koselig
• Burton ski synthetic down vest on the outside
• Leather / down backcountry gloves I bought for $20 at a thrift shop

Lower Body

• Paceline Products Embro - on legs, arms and feet
• Heavyweight full-length winter cycling bibs
• Midweight ski socks
• Diadora winter cycling boots

​Feeling like Randy from a Christmas story.
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Ready to Ride!

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.
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The route.

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:

• HalfPenny
• Blue Spruce - and we ordered every appetizer on the menu there
• Grist

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.