Passes & Canyons Blog

The Honda across the street from the headquarters of Liberty Media, down by Centennial Airport.

About five minutes before I got home on Thursday some guy on a GS ruined the lede I had composed for this blog post. I’m always playing with words in my head when I’m riding so that when the time comes to write about the ride it usually just flows because it’s already half written.

What I intended to lead with was: One telling thing about my ride on Thursday was that I didn’t see one single other rider. Not one. It was cold.

But there I was at Boston and Arapahoe and this guy on a GS goes by. Oh well.

It was cold. Fortunately, for once I was prepared. I wore my riding pants with my heaviest long underwear, my electric vest, and my heated gloves. I almost blew it with the gloves. I figured my winter gloves would be enough but then I figured I might as well bring the heated ones along in the tank bag. Then I had a better thought and put them on right at the start, set to the lowest setting. By the time I came home I was no longer on the lowest setting so you can imagine how cold my hands would have been without the heat.

With all this gear, however, it was a very comfortable ride. It was sunny most of the time and that makes a big difference.

I knew I wanted to be out at least an hour because I needed 46 miles on the Honda to at least get more miles on it this year than last. The time is past to ride in the mountains this year so I headed for the prairie.

Out Hampden all the way till it ends at Gun Club Road and I turned south. I wanted to get onto Smoky Hill Road and then it was my intent to take that series of roads south to where I would get to CO 86 coming west from Elizabeth, then take it west to Franktown. I didn’t have plans beyond Franktown.

But out in that area there are a lot of roads and I don’t get down that way particularly often, so I sometimes am not sure which road is going to come out where. I was wrong this time. I rode Smoky Hill to where it ends with a right turn and becomes Delbert Road. This is out on the current fringes of the city, where the housing developments finally end, and I always like to see just how much more there is out there than the last time I was there. There’s always more.

Delbert ends with a T intersection at Singing Hills Road and at first I thought I was on CO 86 but I soon saw that I was wrong. Oh yeah, I know where this goes. It feeds into Hilltop Road and that leads you back to Parker Road. OK, fine. Not what I planned but it will do.

Actually, looking at the map now I see that a left turn onto Hilltop, rather than the right I took, would have gotten me onto Flintwood Road and that was the one I had been looking for. I’m hoping these details stick better in my brain now.

Now I was headed northwest on Hilltop and crossed the intersection with Parker onto Hess Road. Hess Road bends around and heads south, coming out at I-25 down by Castle Pines. As I like to do there, I got on the frontage road, not the slab, and took that north to Ridgegate Parkway, jogged east on Ridgegate to South Peoria, crossed E-470 and turned left to loop around the south end of Centennial Airport. Then north on Inverness Drive West to Clinton, the jog over to Boston, and a stop at the light at Arapahoe. And there goes that guy on the GS.

Then just north to home. I more than got in my 46 miles and I had a really nice ride. Thank goodness for electrics.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if your jeans are clean; in fact, if any spot on you is clean.