If not for the mosquitoes, this is a perfect camp. The trail here is right along the divide, and we are camped just off if, next to small outcropping. The view is huge. We can see Longs Peak, Wolverine Ridge and all of the terrain of the last half a day of riding.
We can also see our next big goal — Parkview Mountain with a small lookout house on top of it. It looks pretty intimidating, especially given that we know very little about the trail or lack thereof, on the climb.
But that’s a project for tomorrow. Today’s ride started out with some dead-ends. I hadn’t paid much attention to the connection between Grand Lake and Supply Creek road, figuring it would be straightforward. I had much bigger fish to fry from my TopoFusion seat.
There might be a straightforward way for bikes to get onto the road, but there was risk of running into the RMNP entrance booth, where we might be asked to part with a cool ten spot each. Considering we were doing nothing in the park — not even riding the park road, that seemed pretty ridiculous.
Eventually we did find a little neighborhood trail / snowmobile route that took us from our many dead-ends onto the right road.
That road turned steep and gnarly just as we met a group of ATVers and moto-ers. We’d run into numerous other groups as the day went on, but for being a beautiful Saturday, it was pretty quiet.
Supply Creek took us steeply to a rather full trailhead for the Never Summer Wilderness. Everyone was hiking into the Wilderness and we had eyes towards a non-motorized singletrack bypass.
Sound familiar? Yeah, we didn’t have our hopes up too high. I could find little reference to anyone using the Wolverine Bypass trail, and wasn’t even sure where it started.
But after pushing to the ridge above 11,000, we found sweet trail along the ridge and a beautiful contour descent! The trail exists! It’s good, and doesn’t even seem to have much deadfall.
Gamble enough times, eventually you’ll win.
Some of the drop was fall-line and steep, but quite rideable and quite awesome. We popped out onto the Lost Lake road earlier than expected.
A short road ride took us to our two choices for regaining the CDT and the divide. One started from the back of a closed private ranch and was non-moto. The other was an ATV trail that joined at a lower spot.
It was a pretty easy choice. Given all the beetle kill in this area we knew that the ATV trail would be clear of trees. The Bill Creek trail? Unlikely to have much use or trail clearing. And it climbed more.
It was a good choice. The ATV trail was a lot of work but it felt like your work went to good effect. Eszter was digging deep and cranking out some impressive steep stuff. She earns the Hotshot trail name for today.
We ate lunch where we hit the CDT, which continued as a moto singletrack. For a while we leapfrogged with a moto-couple, then we started climbing steeply with recent evidence of hikers.
It was the brits, stopped at a creek. Cool to see them again!
The CDT turned off the moto trail and almost instantly became narrow, quiet and full of downed timber. Oof.
We crossed Willow Creek, somehow jumped in front of two other hikers that camped early, and slowly made our way onto the lower slopes of Parkview. We’ve got a good 2000 feet to gain and not much hope that any of it is going to be rideable.
Something’s going to happen!
Leave a Reply