Day 3: Lunch Loop

GPS Data:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/29244969

Today, we rode the Lunch Loop in Grand Junction which none of us have ever ridden so it was pretty much flying blind with a bunch of hand drawn maps. When we woke up, it was still really windy outside and we could see dark rain clouds in the horizon. The general consensus was that the Lunch Loop trails would be a good idea as we could ride several shorter loops and if it started to rain, we could just cut the ride short…at least that was the plan.

We got to the trailhead and it was pretty brisk outside. The wind was still strong and really wasn’t gearing us up for the ride ahead. After trying to read a bunch of maps both at the trailhead and in our book we decided that we wanted to do the Holy Cross trail.

We started out by climbing up Kurt’s Lane trail where we were encountering signs for trails we had not even heard of. We then found the trailhead for the Holy Cross trail. We went up the Holy Cross trail and the judgement is still out on whether we did it the right way or the wrong way. It was extremely technical and we spent most of our time pushing and carrying our bikes. This might seem like we did it the wrong way…but I’m not really sure if it would be easier the other way as there were tons of ledges, steep technical drops and really tight sections that looked like they would have been really difficult going the other way as well.

When we reached the top of Holy Cross we decided to try and bike up to the infamous Ribbon trail. After a few more miles of climbing we got to the highway where we met up with some locals and asked for directions to the Ribbon. The locals told us that with the wind that it would pretty much be hell climbing up the road to the trailhead and that the Ribbon was more of a downhill trail…and then told us we would have much more fun on the Gunny Loop. At this point we were tired of hiking and the wind so just wanted a sweet single track downhill so we opted to do the Gunny Loop back to the car.

The Gunny loop down from the road was tons of fun. It was fairly fast single track at the top which was pretty windy but not overly technical that went into a high-speed jeep trail descent. This almost made up for the climbing and the sun started to come out a little bit although it was still really windy. There were a couple really steep descents where my butt was pretty much an inch away from my rear tire but it was probably much safer to ride down then trying to walk/slide down. As we finished off the Gunny loop we decided we would try and take the shortest way back to the car as the rain in the horizon and cold wind just weren’t conducive to enjoyable riding. We rode back up to Kurt’s lane back down to the car and called it a day.

- Kyle