Hey KZR,
This past Thursday, 4/14/16, Pops and I were able to get in a absolutely brilliant ride! Started off in Johnstown, CO at 11am riding away heading west into the Loveland and Fort Collins, CO area. Went the back way into the foothills in front of Carter Lake and connected to US Hwy 34 for a short time until we turned North and headed into Masonville which is a local small town biker spot with leather shops and some restaurants. At that point we turned west and headed up into the hills and started climbing until we made it to one of the oldest continuously running schools in Colorado, Stove Prairie at over 7000 ft elevation, which was founded and started operating in 1896 as an elementary school and still is in use as an elementary school today! In fact, school was in session when we drove by it on Thursday hahaha.
From there we continued to head north up/down Rist Canyon Rd and it was EMPTY!!! One of the absolute best technical stretches of road I have ever seen in Colorado and we had it completely to ourselves!!!! HOT DOGGIE
Not only was the road completely devoid of any other motorists other than ourselves but there was lots less sh!t on the roads than I was expecting as well. Not to say that there were no hazards there, that would be a lie, but when we saw the sand, or dirt or gravel etc it wasn't mid-corner or anything like that and was easily avoided without severely impacting our lines throughout the turns. The road itself though, man oh man what a road! Rest Canyon Rd has everything an aggressive canyon carver would want, increasing radius turns, decreasing radius turns, blind turns, big fast high speed sweepers, banked corners, rises into tight hairpins and all sorts of other fantastic goodies! For someone like myself that is an aggressive rider by nature and someone who is trying to challenge themselves and improve their riding ability and body positioning it was just tits!
Anyways, once we ate up all of Rist Canyon Rd it dead ends into Poudre Canyon where we took a left and headed West up the canyon even further. A really gorgeous ride with spectacular scenery, gorgeous white water rivers and rapids, cliffs and craggy mountains and the sun shining like it just wouldn't quit
Eventually though we hit some construction and decided to turn around and not deal with it. Went back down Poudre Canyon a few miles and pulled off on the side of the road at a campground location and broke for lunch. Had some slow roasted home made carnitas courtesy of Momma’s home cooking that Pops packed and some crackers, buffalo and venison jerky, cheese, tuna salad and starbucks doubleshot to wake us back up. The weather and river and scenery were so outstanding that we decided to take a bit of extra time and have a shorter robust sized cigar. I lit of a La Aurora 1495 cameroon wrapper stick that was very very nice, while Pops has a Don Pepin’ Garcia blend robo too. Here are some pics of our scenery at lunch: