Monarch Crest Part 1

Well the initial plan for today was to drive up to the Monarch Pass and head north on the Continental Divide Trail. Its not a normal ride and even one of the guide books mentions that you will be using your bike alot as a very expensive walking stick. The forecast looked reasonable but by the time we got up there, a little after 8 in the morning, it was already starting to look rather iffy in that direction. A few other riders intending to do the normal monarch crest ride rolled in and upon talking with them we had a very scary story about one of the riders doing that section when a storm rolled in. So we went with Plan B. Like howie said, we are pretty spoiled when Plan B is one of the greatest rides in US. Normally this ride is done as a shuttle, that is the riders get dropped off at the pass, climb up to the ridge, ride along it, then ride down to their waiting vehicle in Poncha Springs or Salida. Since we didn't have that luxury, our plan was to do an out n back on the ridge section like we had done two years ago. Theres an initial rather short grunt up a couple dirt roads then you start hitting views like this



The trail tread is in remarkably good shape for being so exposed, some of that has to do with the fact that all the snow had only melted a couple weeks ago. At 12,000 feet you really do feel like you are on top of the world. Since the ride was going to be a little on the short side we thought we would check out one of the trails heading down off the ridge, doing a mini out n back. Down Green Creek trail we went, but after about a quarter mile we both decided that it wasn't that much fun to go down to make up for the pain that it was going to take to climb back out, so we headed back up at that point. We headed across then down a bit and after 10 miles reaching a dirt road that headed down to Marshall Pass, the route taken when doing the shuttle ride. Like the first time we did this as an out n back, I figured we were going to turn around at that point, thinking that 20 miles all above 11,000 of elevation was going to be enough. Apparently I was mistaken because we started to drop down to Marshall Pass. Neither of us could remember exactly what the route was like after the Pass but I did remember at least some singletrack so since we were down there, why not go see what its like. We were rewarded with some great track, 2.5 miles out, then the same back, mostly forested but with a couple nice views

We ran into the same hiker that we had seen yesterday on the previous section of the Colorado trail and remarked it would be really wild if we ran into him when we were down in Durango as well. There were a couple of "bike-packers" camping out at the one shelter we went by but didn't really get a chance to talk to them. We also talked bikes with a couple of other hikers that we passed.
Total ride mileage was 27.5 taking about 5.5 hours. We topped off the ride with a well deserved double scoop of ice cream at the gift store place there at the pass where we parked.