The Poudre Trail

On Saturday the forecast was for a nice day, temps in the mid-20s. Sunny and basically a good bike riding day as long as you ignored the possibility of "10-20mph northerly winds" in the afternoon.

So we set out on a ride along the Poudre Trail. The Cache La Poudre is of course the local river.

We found this old suspension bridge fascinating.

It seemed to carry a flume, most probably from the old reservoir behind the pics to the land on the other side. There is no information about it at the site - wonder what it was for?

After we had ridden about 10km, I was Hungry. We stopped off in Old Town at Nathan's fave cafe, Starry Night, where he had stuffed squash with pasta salad and I had plain brown rice with steamed vegies. Ah the fun of a GF/DF diet.

We heard trains tooting lots. It is very common around Fort Collins. Trains toot all day long. There is the train that goes through Old Town, the one that I raced the other day, that has to toot at every intersection, ie continuously. There is a shunting area that crosses two main roads (you oughta hear the fighting about how to fix the problem of cars being stuck for 20-odd minutes at a time! Like dooooods, build a bridge for the cars! Can't do an underpass as it is likely to flood). There is another shunting area that doesn't cross roads but does mean LOTS of tooting at every points.

So we rode along the Poudre Trail and suddenly came upon a train shunting. For the train nuffies out here, I give you one of the grottiest old unloved engines I've ever seen, along with a lovely, well painted one:

The driver hopped out of the cabin and adjusted some points, then the train crept backwards.

Then Nathan said there was another train coming! And there was! The above train was crawling backwards towards the south and this train came from the west:


After 10 minutes of staring at trains and taking a gazillion photos, I decided that it was time to keep riding.

We rode and rode and rode and rode. I forgot to take pics of the river - I thought I would do it on the way back. Best laid plans and all that. Eventually we pretty much cleared town and were out in open space,


surrounded by reservoirs, and with views of the uplift of the Rockies:




and a quarry:

(the conveyor belt was fascinating - about a mile long, no joke! The hole in the ground showed that the soils here must be in part glacial as there are layers of pebbles of varying sizes)

There were critters




and one place even had a red barn!

(I don't know why red barns are noice but they are)

Nathan was getting pretty tired by now but I could see a band of greenery about another mile up the trail, so I rode on ahead. Turns out there is an absolutely fantastic bridge across the Poudre:






I wish I could show you the "film" of riding along the bike bridge but I didn't think to do it as a movie, just as burst mode. The footway of the bridge is made of wooden planks which have curled a bit so the pictures bounce up and down in a most amusing way.

Finally, a picture of the Poudre itself:

We rode back to Old Town for Nathan's afternoon tea (an icecream in a waffle cone) and then home. All in all we rode over 30km, or more than 20 miles. For us that is a long ride!

Into the mountains

Last weekend we took us for a trip up the Poudre Canyon. The Poudre (the way the locals say it sounds like poo-dah, rather like Aussies would say puta for computer but we discover that puta means something else in spanish... ho ho ho is a hint and I ain't talking Santa Claus here, so no more p*ta for us - how the heck were we to know since we don't speak Spanish? The Spanish poppulation of Oz is very small) is the local river. Wikipedia has very little to say about it. It is a wild river, at least at this stage of the year when the last of the melt is still filtering down.

We stopped at the first info place along the way. The info was not so interesting - watch out for ticks, welcome to the Poudre Canyon, etc. The info bay was very like a lot that we see in Oz, except with a GINORMOUS pothole that tried to eat our car. You guys in the USA like big things, doncha? ;-) One particularly interesting thing was this:

some sort of assassin bug. Yep, it has a victim. It's a bug eat bug world out there.

So we travelled on into the canyon. The hills around us started rising up

and we started seeing people on big inner tubes floating down the river.

We had to go through a tunnel

but be careful if you insist on having a rig that is more than 14'3" high!

and the hills kept rising up around us


The types of plants around changed a lot as we drove further up the canyon. It started off being arid type plants - scrubby grasses, not much in the way of shrubs or trees. Then we started getting what I presume are some sort of ponderosa pines and some prairie wildflowers




The Poudre had times when it was quite calm, though flowing swiftly, and times when it was quite quite excited:


We saw lots of white water rafting groups and some kayakers:



(Yes, he is going backwards at this point - he is effectively trying to paddle up stream. It didn't work. He ended up going over a small waterfall upside down and came up about 10 seconds later, going in the right direction this time...)

We kept climbing up and up. It became quite obvious what sort of valley we were driving in:

even though we have very few U-shaped valleys in Oz.

The park info centre, the one that is manned, was really good. We had a good chat with the people who are working there (as volunteers for the summer!). Some people love to talk to us about where we come from and we love to find out how they came to be where they are too. I think we spent most of an hour there. They also have only 4% sales tax, so I bought up big! LOL - 12 post cards and a little book to identify wildflowers. Plus they had the most civilised long drop dunnies I have ever seen - they even came with electric hand-driers and water! And loo paper too! Too much to expect! (I have seen at least two publications highlighting Colorado outhouses now, so I am glad to see that I am amongst friends here.)

I think I'll need the book for the wildflowers....


More soon!

Who put the poo in the Poudre?

Today we took us for a drive!

What fun! What excitement! I drove on the wrong side once (we were at over 10,000 feet, or a fair whack higher than anywhere on mainland Oz), Nathan almost drove off the right side several times!

Beautiful views, wonderful wildflowers (we figure most are native, but some of the same plants are weeds in Oz, so we have to change our viewpoint to go oh, purdy, not oh purdy but it shouldn't be here!), a gazillion photos....

But the important question for the day is who put the poo in the Poudre? At a pull off point in this wonderful wild river, I hopped down some stairs and was greeted with a wonderful sight, not. What on earth is that stuff? It can't be! My god, it is! Like don't people in the USA know not to take a dump at the edge of the river? Especially if they do it right on a rock? We have wombats in Oz. Wombats poop on top of rocks and roots to tell other wombats to rack off, this is my place, go find your own, leading to poo wars where various wombats all claim an area. Wombat poo is cuboid (rather like wombats, which are solid blocks of muscle) and looks dreadfully uncomfortable to pass (which may account for the wombat's rather dyspeptic, or should we choose constipated and grumpy, temperament).

Apart from that, a wonderful day. Coloradoans do *great* rocks. And water. And scenery. Pics later, when they have finally downloaded from the camera :-)