Comments on: Doubletop to 409 And A Half

By: bryan

bryan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:56:39 +0000

Agreed. doctors park is most pure and unadulterated mountain descent in Colorado. nothing but a thing of beauty. will be on it this weekend for sure…

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:53:25 +0000

Sweet long ride, Bryan! Sadly, there’s a lot of rough areas out there, especially the ones that stay wet. Worse still, there are quite a few moto riders out there that will continue to ride closed trails and the areas around Reno divide and Doubletop have numerous pirate moto trails, and all of those are a mess. On the other hand, I recently rode Doctor’s Park, with its brand new no moto signage, made all the more complete with the addition of a discretely parked Forest Service vehicle ready to bust any offenders.

The moto crowd has done a great job convincing mountain bikers that they built all the trails, but that simply isn’t true. If you read up on some of the local history books, you’ll see that most of the trails here were actually built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression. Yay for government bailouts! 🙂

I’ll give motos this one though: They clear out the vast majority of downed trees.

By: bryan

bryan — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:21:56 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of riding from cement creek up to 409.5, then around strand to bait and tackle, and back over to cement creek. cement creek trail (bottom of bait and tackle), showed some of the most irresponsible trail use I have ever seen, all of it by motos.

It looked like they were getting ready for a re-route, but the area is very low and wet. The trail crosses at least 4 sections of marsh / stream where motos have rutted in 5 or 6 different routes across the stream. Terrible to see that happen anywhere.

It is ironic that while motos created most of those trails, they’re going to lose access to them in the future unless they can become aware of the consequences of their actions.

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:44:00 +0000

Michal-

It is indeed frustrating to see trails change for the worse, or simply close completely, but of course there is always a new trail or a “new” old trail to check out and possibly fall in love with, and so it goes.

As for the elevation profile (yes, you said it correctly :)), we banged out a lot of miles on a relatively easy dirt road before hitting the very steep climb of Block and Tackle, as well as many other short and steep climbs on Doubletop itself. The miles (km) on the singletrack itself did not go quickly. After the singletrack, we once again had some easy roads on the way back to town. The overall elevation gain was probably in the 5-6,000′ range (~1,800 meters or so).

By: Michał

Michał — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:21:19 +0000

Oh, and I particularly liked the final stop 😉 No wonder you had the motivation to make it to the end.

By: Michał

Michał — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:19:26 +0000

40 mi of a mountain track in 6h now that’s a nice pace. I’m just wondering what the elevation profile is like (don’t know how to call it – mean ratio of ascents and descents) as in the area where I ride the most mountains are not as high but the trails are pretty steep and you need to push it hard only to go down very steeply some mile later. So it sometimes takes 6h to just make 25 miles.
Sadly, I’ve recently also noticed a similar thing happen to the trails I used to ride some 10 years ago. They’ve changed over the years for worse, unfortunatelly. Some of them, just like Doubletop, wasted by dirtbikes, some others by aggressive logging activities. Had it not been for the good memory of turns and other trail characteristics, I wouldn’t have recognized some of those I took this year. Sad to hear the same thing happen to yours.