San Juan Vacation 2012

I've done enough riding lately that my butt no longer needs bike pants. So when I rode my bike up to Clear Lake, and then back down, I discovered a better reason to wear bike pants. They keep your gnuts from slap-slap-slappin' the seat when you're flying down a rocky road.

Ice lake is the most unreal color of blue I've ever seen. And it's fed by a river that coats the black rocks with white residue. Yet trout are growing happy as can be within the waters. At first, I thought it must be a hot springs up above, but the source was cold all the way up.

On the Hardrock 100 course, I haven't been here in YEARS! I didn't plan to be there. My other plans didn't wash, so I made new ones. In the dark, I dead-reckoned my way in the moonless dark to the spot where the KT aid station gets set up. I parked and went to sleep.

I made long days of hiking and biking. Four days to the Run Rabbit Run 50. I'm still old, fat, and slow, but my size has shrunken some (temporarily) right before the race. I weigh the same, but I've turned a lot of fat back into muscle.

Vacation

I'm taking a much needed vacation. This is both a relaxation and work-out vacation. Kind of convoluted, like most stuff I do.
Started by going camping with my son. Tested out my new ultra-light sleeping bags I bought for fast-packing/biking. Each weigh 1lbs. I figure one can be used as a ground pad on soft ground or sand, or if it gets too cold, I'll put one inside the other. The green-gray bag MtnHardware 800-fill. You can barely see the purple Western Mountaineering HighLite underneath. The spread blue bag is a cheap-ass Coleman type bag. No use wearing-out my flimsy bags if I don't have to.

Flowers near Kenosha Pass. I shot my black powder pistol here.

View of Denver from my friend Kim's rooftop deck.


I'm about to take off to find my two brothers in the San Juans near Lake City. Then I'll leave them for more gallivanting on my own.

Training on Princeton & Antero

Plan A was to pace people at the Leadville 100, but as I got closer, I was not feeling in the mood for crowds, noise, etc. I realized I was too battle-worn from work and needed a stress-relieving weekend, not a stress-creating weekend.
So I left the Twin Lakes area and headed back to Buena Vista.
Saturday, climbed Princeton. Smoky scenery. Started too late, finished by flashlight.

Sunday, ran Antero.

Smoky scenery from forest fires.

Passed four 4x4's going down. The last guy was yelling at me but I couldn't understand. He didn't seem mad, just bewildered. Probably wondered how anyone could sprint down a road that's basically a steep pile of rock rubble. To tell the truth, I don't know how. It's freaky to see the road which totally looks un-runnable, and yet I really had no trouble. I guess the rocks were just loose enough to yield the way they needed, while not being too large. And the underlying dirt road was smooth and firm enough not to cause any ankle twisting. So it looked far more impossible than it was.
Quads got a good trashing, but not totally wasted.
Road my bike 2hrs Monday.
Road my bike 90min Tuesday.
Ran 5.5M Wed as fast as I could, but I was fairly worn-out. Going to sit on my ass a day or two to make sure I don't end up doing too much too soon. And injury would SUCK, at this point. My body is responding better than expected. It's starting to feel like the old days. Still over 3wks until Steamboat 50.
I found a black smudge on my inner thigh. I put some alcohol on a wash rag and tried to wash it off. It wouldn't. So I looked closer. It's a big ass bruise. Funny that it doesn't hurt much. I don't know how I managed to do it.
The knees hurt and my right foot and heel hurt, but nothing a couple days of rest shouldn't take care of.

View from Nice Property

There's no water on this land, which makes it fairly worthless. No power, either. Still, 10 acres with a commanding view and they're asking $119,000.

I love this furniture! The carpet is tile laid in concrete. The couch, table, and footstool are tile on steel frame.

G&T Training Run

Running Grays and Torreys from the I-70 parking lot is a 14 mile classic training run. Previously, I always ran this for a new PR, but this time I was more interested in not getting hurt, and spending a little more time higher up. Normally, I crash pretty hard once or twice, since the footing is treacherous. I'm sure a lot of flat-landers freak when they see someone running through jagged rocks, some anchored and some loose. How does he keep from falling?! He doesn't - he crashes and hopes not to break something. That's why I wear bike gloves when I trail-run. Only I forgot to bring my bike gloves. So another reason to simmer-down and get a good, safe workout. The whole point is to gain ground, not lose ground. I brought two Buffs, those tubes of stretchy, breathable fabric that are so versatile. I had a drinking bottle in one hand and a Buff wrapped in a figure-8 on the other. Not quite as good as bike gloves, but better than nothing.

 For a time-trial PR, it requires a strict strategy. All I bring is a large drink bottle, a hooded wind-shirt in a cargo pocket in my shorts, and a couple of Vi gel-paks. Before leaving, I drink a whole quart of Gatorade with a little extra salt added, and I eat a couple of trailbars for breakfast. Then I wait around about 15 minutes, stretching while this liquid bolus gets absorbed. Then I take off on a quick power-hike. Once warmed up, I start walking-jogging (wogging) up the road.
Skin absorbs water when you ascend. It puffs up like a sponge. You can't tell, but it's robbing your organs of fluids. That's another reason you have to drink extra fluids when in the mountains. However, when you descend, the process reverses. So when moving very quickly up and down, you can allow yourself to run very low on water on the ascent, and barely have enough to wet your throat on the descent. If I arrive at my car a little dehydrated, then another quart of Gatorade awaits.

This time, I didn't follow this strategy. I just loaded up with a 2 liter hydration bladder and a large water bottle, 1st-aid kit, wind-shirt, trailbars, gels, Buffs, phone (camera), and even still had my wallet. So a PR wasn't even planned. I think it took about 4:20, or something like that. My PR was exactly 3:45.

I ended up straining my left quad when putting on the brakes to avoid a civilian. (That's what I jokingly refer to as regular folks on the trail.) I figure normal people have right-of-way, especially if they have kids. I had to take Sunday completely off training to make sure my quad wasn't going to be a full-blown injury.
Tuesday, I ran barefoot on the asphalt around a couple of blocks in my neighborhood. Wash Park has so many geese and so much goose shit paving the roads and trails that I don't think it's safe to run barefoot. My neighborhood has fairly clean streets, and a pedestrian path a couple blocks away. The asphalt is just rough enough to allow some good toughening of the feet without ripping them up. Eventually, I hope to be able to do the 2-mile Harvard Gulch Park route completely barefoot. For some reason the geese haven't discovered that park.

A couple of days before, on Thursday, I road my bike at Bear Creek Lake Park. It looked like the sky would dump an ocean on me as I drove there, but it only sprinkled as I was parking and getting my bike out. That's another reason I ignore the weather. It lies all the time. Too many woulda-coulda-shoulda's. Now I just "do".

Training High

Check out the low clouds nestled in the Dillon valley in the distance over my left shoulder.

Bierstadt was too short so we added Square Top. Then once on top of Square Top, we looked around and decided to make a grand-loop and went back the long way. 17.2 mile day

Silver Dollar trail and lake (right)

Paleolithic Stone

My brother, Joe, and I decided to do some metal-detecting in an area full of .30 cal, .50 cal, and other misc. blown up bits of WWII nostalgia. It ended up being really boring. We kept finding .50 cal bullets, only one dented brass casing, and a .30 cal bullet. We spent hours doing this.
Then on the way back to the car, I was looking down and noticed a rock that wasn't anything like the color of the surrounding dirt and rocks. Nearly everything was medium tan, light tan, or alkali light gray. So this stone stood out, being golden brown. I picked it up and examined it. I couldn't fathom a rock ending up quite like it without the aid of human hands.
I punched a waypoint on my GPS and called my brother over to look at it. He agreed, no way it got like that by accident.
I figured it was a normal Native American arrowhead, maybe a couple hundred years old.
Upon doing some research, I'd say it looks more like an Clovis or Paleo Indian point. It's in bad condition, so the tip and base are gone. It might have been as much as 9 inches long, or it might only have been a few inches.
A logical way it got broken is when it got lanced into a bison or mammoth, so in spite of it being in bad shape, it seems kind of even "cooler" than it might have been in one piece.
Maybe it isn't very old, but there's a chance it's nearly 10,000 years old.

I'm not sure what to do. I don't know where to go or who to ask. I'm not sure how hard it is to get something carbon-dated. It would be great if I could. I Googled some anthropologists and paleontologists, but they all seem to be dead or retired.

These are not live rounds, folks. Just cleaned-up and bullets shoved into the casings. You can see the rifling scars on the bullets if you look close enough.

The area we were looking in was used as a target practice range by airplanes and soldiers. The historical maps we found claimed the area was never inhabited, except to place targets. It was for airplanes to swoop down and shoot or bomb stationary targets. Yet we found plenty of evidence that ground troops had large camps and practiced maneuvers there. The .30 cal bullets were probably shot out of the old bolt-action Springfileds. M1 Garands were more likely sent tot he front lines. The .50 case and the link (found separately) were probably fired from a stationary Browning M2 mounted on a tripod.
There's also an interesting landing strip on the southern edge of the range that appears to be too short to be a landing strip. I measured it and discovered it's the exact same scale of an aircraft carrier. I don't know if they were bombing this with inert practice bombs or practicing short take-offs. Maybe both?
The range dates back to the 1930's, pre-WWII.