Suburban Mountain Biking

First bike ride of the year was kind of rough. I did about 8 miles, mostly just "laps" around the unpaved part of the open space across the street from my house. My subdivision, Highlands Ranch, was once three or four real ranches which were bought up 30 years ago or so for housing. My immediate neighborhood is on the site of the old Cheese Ranch (where they raised diary rather than beef cattle, obviously) and the open space is a little piece of the former grazing land. I also think the open space includes the site of the ranch house, although all that remains is the windmill. There are both paved and unpaved trails running though the open space, and these can be used -- sometimes with a quick jog of a block or three on real streets -- to connect to a whole system of trails running through other bits of open space and green belts throughout Highlands Ranch which, when I'm feeling really ambitious, can take me out of the subdivision to the Platte Rive, Chatfield reservoir, and up Waterton Canyon into mountains.

There are a couple of less extreme ways of getting vertical using the same system of trails; the route I just described would be at least 16 miles just getting to bottom of the canyon. There are nice bluffs to the south and east which I can get to in 20 minutes or so; they're enough to make one think that one is really doing some mountain biking, anyhow. I've not yet done any actual biking on real mountain trails. This summer I hope to be able to report differently.

Did some spring cleaning and decided to throw out my old golf clubs. They were ancient (I bought them used years ago) and they weren't very good. However, I kept the excellent leather bag. It now holds my sledge hammer and several smaller hammers.