Category: Bibleburg

On the road again

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments
The corner of PPIR and I-25
That's "Hanover," not "Hangover," though I have felt hungover here many a time while chasing leather-lunged leg-shavers back in the Nineties.

I don’t care what the calendar says — yesterday was the first day of fall. It was mostly cool and overcast until late in the day, when summer made something of a comeback. Nice change from the 90-plus weather we’ve been enjoying lately.

Naturally, I didn’t get out for a ride. It’s been heavy lifting around here, what with breaking in a new dog, working the VN.com site by myself on weekends, and deadlines for Velo the magazine (Monday) and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News (Wednesday).

The BRAIN column was a real bitch to write. The turmoil at Velo and VeloNews.com has been much on my mind, as has my friend Charles Pelkey’s cancer, and of course the never-ending mad-hattery in the nation’s capital, where the League of Small Hat Sizes holds sway. So I’ve been oscillating between rage and despair, neither of which is exactly fertile ground for bicycle comedy.

Nevertheless I prevailed — I shat out something, words in a row, and beat the clock with minutes to spare. And today I fled the office and the Innertubes for a fat-burning 50-miler that really flushed out the old headgear.

I’ve been contemplating a short bicycle tour, but finding a safe, pleasurable route out of Bibleburg has proven problematic. I’ve never liked riding Highway 24 west — too easy to get picked off by an 18-wheeler or RV between Manitou Springs and Cascade. North lies Jesus country and then Denver; no, thanks. And nobody in his right mind goes east. We’re Westerners, goddamnit.

That leaves south. But Highway 115 is under construction through October at both ends — Fort Carson and Penrose — and after a short recon by Subaru the other day I crossed that formerly delightful highway off my list, too. Single-lane climbs, gravel trucks and commuting prison guards give me the heebie-jeebies.

Thus the mainline out of Bibleburg is Interstate 25 — not exactly the sort of bucolic backroad one sees chronicled in Adventure Cyclist magazine. Still, you tour with the road you have, not  the road you might want or wish to have at a later time. So today’s outing was something of a recon on two wheels, and it proved very illuminating indeed.

I wanted to avoid as much of the interstate as possible and so took Las Vegas Street to Highway 85/87, and portions of both roads sucked very much indeed, as in crumbling 55-mph two-laners with little or no shoulder. Nonetheless I survived and picked up I-25 at the Fountain exit. Hoo-boy, was that ever a barrel of laughs. At least the endless parade of tractor-trailer rigs blunted the headwind until I pulled off at the defunct Pikes Peak International Raceway, 22 miles south of the DogHaus.

Coming back was excellent. I not only had a tailwind, I skipped the interstate in favor of Old Pueblo Road, which is a staple of the leg-shavers’ Saturday ride out of Acacia Park downtown. It’s a winding two-laner that heads back to Fountain, and traffic was light, practically non-existent.

At Fountain I briefly considered revisiting the 85/87-to-Las Vegas route and then said screw it, instead picking up the Fountain Creek Regional Trail, which leads to the Pikes Peak Greenway Trail and home. Fat city, especially with a tailwind. More miles, but more smiles.

This, incidentally, is how Brian Gravestock of Old Town Bike Shop and the Bike Clinic Too gets out of Dodge when he has a hankering for some Mexican food in Pueblo, 45 miles south of here. He rides the trail to Fountain, picks up Old Pueblo, and then takes the frontage road where it’s available and the interstate where it’s not.

Sure beats sweltering in the office, awaiting evil tidings.

The dog days

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

There was a smallish wake for Paulette in the neighborhood last night.

Our newest neighbors, Larry and Jill, popped round to tell us of it. They occupy a pivotal corner, the Block of Gibraltar, which overlooks a vast expanse of the ’hood, and being excellent people they are already hip-deep in the goings-on. So we stayed up a bit past our bedtime telling tall tales and sipping champagne in Paulette’s honor.

This morning we were a bit sluggish for some reason, and I skipped my daily ride in favor of a stroll around the neighborhood, which used to be Paulette’s job. She and Bob the chocolate Lab would patrol up and down, east and west, north and south, collecting valuable intelligence in the service of us all.

And a dog helps. Herself learned that today, while walking Buddy (yes, he has officially been christened). Folks notice a dog-walker, especially if they happen to be walking a dog themselves, and stop to chat.

What degree of a dog is that? We’ve not seen you before … oh, wait a minute, you’re the folks on the alley, next to Mike! We thought you were cat people. And you are? How on earth does everyone get along? And so on and so forth.

This has always been a close neighborhood, but it got a little bit closer yesterday. Why, I saw Democrats and Republicans drinking and joking together, and you just know that’s no bullshit, because I’m a professional journalist.

Going for the Gold

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Gold Camp Road
Bibleburg as seen from the single-track detour over the collapsed tunnel that keeps Gold Camp Road blessedly free of dinosaur-powered tourism.

I was feeling guilty about not riding yesterday (too tired, too hot, too wussified), so today I sacked up and did something I’ve been thinking about for a while — rode from Chez Dog up Old Stage Road to its intersection with Gold Camp Road and then down Gold Camp back home.

It’s been a while since I tackled that ride — 15 years or so — and last time around some friends and I found ourselves climbing through a series of stimulating weather patterns, each worse than the one that preceded it, until we were descending Gold Camp in a full-on snowstorm.

Today I was by myself and glad of it, too, because I ain’t the dog I was then and can no longer bear the howls of derisive laughter. I spent a shameless amount of time in the Voodoo Nakisi’s granny (22×28) and recycled a fair amount of salt because I was sweating all over my downtube water bottle. There were no snowstorms, only dust storms whipped up by passing motorists hellbent on enhancing the washboard on the gravel road.

The descent was big fun, though. I shot past a crowd of casual mountain bikers who had been ferried by van to the intersection of Old Stage and Gold Camp, at 9,000 feet, and were enjoying the leisurely, traffic-free descent back to town (a collapsed tunnel some years back closed the road to motorized traffic). I greeted a few and should have stopped to chat, but I was hot and sweaty and tired and thirsty and I could tell that not one of these folks had an ice-cold beer or an air conditioner on them.

So on I plummeted, and after a quick shower and a semi-massive lunch with lots of water I dropped by McCabe’s Irish Tavern for a couple pints of Bristol Brewing’s Compass IPA. I had a column to write, and they had beer and air conditioning. It seemed the smart thing to do, for a change.

Here’s fish in your eye

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Fisheyed Front Strange
Acid flashback? Nope, just the wizards at Canon messing with our minds again.

I didn’t get out for a ride today until the afternoon thunderclouds were rolling in, and wasn’t but four blocks away from Chez Dog when the first raindrops began to fall.

Summoning my inner Belgian, I pressed on, and atop the Col du Austin Bluffs Parkway, by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I stopped to snap this pic of the Front Range using the Canon PowerShot 300HS‘s fisheye-lens feature. This sort of effrontery must make real photographers feel the way I do when some mouth-breather with a netbook and a Twitter account proclaims himself a writer.

Meanwhile, the other day I cycle up to Grandview Overlook in Palmer Park and see another cyclist there. We start chatting, and he mentions that he used to live in California, and I ask why he left, expecting some tale about selling some shitbox condo for a bazillion dollars and buying the Broadmoor as a pied-a-terre until something of quality hits the market.

“Couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” he said. “The bank wouldn’t work with us, so we handed them the keys and said, ‘See you.'”

Now, I don’t know the backstory. But the dude went from “owning” a house in California to ranching the view from an apartment in a tough part of Bibleburg, and that’s got to sting, no matter how nifty the Front Range looks from the saddle of your bicycle.

High and dry

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

When my family moved from Texas to Colorado Springs in August 1967 we saw a thick white blanket of snow on Pikes Peak as we drove into town.

“Holy shit,” I thought. “It snows here in August.”

The first day of summer 2011
The big fella wears his white hat on the first day of summer.

We knew something about snow, having lived three years in Ottawa, Canada. But Randolph AFB, Texas, was “a whole other country,” as the slogan has it. It snowed just twice in our five years there — about a zillionth of an inch each time — and the whole place went batshit. Schools closed, non-essential personnel stayed home, and we scratched our heads, wondering what all the fuss was about.

That glimpse of Pikes Peak was a reminder that in some places, it actually does snow enough to cause a fuss. By arriving in summertime we had been spared a massive winter dumper that had set folks in our new suburban neighborhood to heating with ornamental fireplaces and cooking over camp stoves in the absence of utility service.

I’ve seen plenty of the white stuff since, including a four-footer that had us snowshoeing up and down our road in Westcliffe and a couple lesser storms that let us ski the roads and parks here in Bibleburg.

But it’s been a while, and lately even rain is scarce. So I’m always happy to look up and see a little snow on the big hill. We may catch fire down here, but at least we’ll have water to drink, and something to scare Texans with on the first day of summer.