Click on a location in the list to zoom to it. Note how long my 2 completed routes are this year compared to my old college commute!

link Lifting the Kickstand

My first bike was a refurbished beater from a little community run shop called Recycled Cycles in Fort Collins. My dad tried his hardest to push me towards a swifter, lighter (harder, better, faster, stronger) bike but it was unfortunately purple. I valued those traits but it had to look cool above all. So I went with an older silver Raleigh for the style.

That Raleigh was the workhor… bike that got me through high school, as we were within biking distance for my morning commutes. Our family often went on ~20 mile bike rides but infrequently enough that every time felt like a total slog. I had to be convinced with ice cream at our destination. But I slowly began to love the process, take joy in the wind whipping my face and the leaves whispering in the air beside me. But I still need that ice cream at the end, don’t get it twisted.

By college it received an upgrade. As I started thinking about urban planning I also started thinking about the utility of ebikes as a better way of completing certain errands in my life. So my dad, upon hearing me bring it up one too many times, bought it for my christmas present. Well not an ebike. An ebike conversion kit!

So after we built it together, and discovered some parts wouldn’t fit and still others were incompatible, I had my homebrewed ebike! Many commutes to college later, the route of which is depicted in the map, I reached a total mileage of 524 miles!

link Kicking it Up A Gear

My first serious recreational bike ride since high school happened during, sorry, after college. I had no need for recreational pedaling amongst my daily commutes, often with Colorado’s brutal snowstorms persisting as ice on the ground long after, so to most observers aware of my routine I may seem to have just been using an ebike for the fashion.

Not so. I do love biking, and I was ready to prove it. So in the middle of my Japan trip with 2 friends at the end of 2024 I shoved in a cheeky ride in Hiroshima prefecture. This route often appears on bikers' top 10 list in the world. It is the Shiminami Kaido, hopping between islands in the Seto Inland Sea, and it is around 70km (43 miles). My previous record in high school was 20 miles so this was bold. But I ended up having a great time, with absolutely perfect weather and plenty of vending machine soda to keep me going.

So, returning to the states, I hit up a friend who actually kept up with recreational biking (by way of mountain biking) and we decided to try some routes in Denver together.

link Biking This Year

Our first route was intended to up the ante. So it was 43 miles… twice.

Looking at most of the bike routes in Denver we saw them ending too soon. 43 miles easily covers the diameter of greater Denver, even more so the radius (as we intended to start at Union Station). Cherry Creek Trail came to the rescue and provided an uninterrupted 40+ miles of bike path. I wanted us to stretch this into 2 days so we put a night in Castle Rock, as I’ve never been, at the end of the first day.

link Castle Rock

We began outside Union Station so we could have an official starting point for all of our rides. I chose to use a real beater of a used bike instead of my ebike so I could match the speed of my friend (and have the real experience; 40 miles on an ebike is not much to write home about).

We both primarily relied on convenience stores to stock up on food and water, as I wanted to simulate bikepacking for later adventures. We unintentionally simulated another aspect of bikepacking when my beater sprung a leak, requiring us to patch the hole.

We enjoyed the transition from LoDo, Cap Hill, Cherry Creek, Glendale, Cherry Creek State Park and eventually Parker, where it stopped feeling like Denver altogether. The sky felt huge out here, with constant reminders that we were in a different world than what we had started in.

A particular highlight in this area was the South Metro Fire Training Center, designed to give firefighters a simulation of an emergency situation in multiple ways. There was the multistory residential building, single story cramped brick maintenance building and what I can only call a CounterStrike map.

There was a lone swing off the trail that I just had to try as well.

Down at The Pinery we finally reached our junction; where we left the trusty Cherry Creek Trail to begin threading between trails and residential streets on our way to downtown Castle Rock.

Nearing castle rock we reached a portion of the trail covered in gravel and mud. We had a hell of a time getting that off our tires. But we were rewarded with some gorgeous sights. Castle Rock felt to me like a mountain village, say Breckenridge, lifted and moved into the great plains.

And with nearly 40 miles behind us we descended into Castle Rock, my first time in the city.

I received my obligatory ice cream in the form of some chicken fried steak… and apple pie with ice cream. We celebrated 43 miles; my longest ever ride.

The next day we woke up early, ready for an entire day of downhill. Unfortunately, it averaged a downhill 1% grade, which you can barely feel. So it felt just as laborious as the first day. But we had to finish what we started (we were stranded 50 miles outside Denver without a car, this was the only way we had to get back!).

When we passed by the South Metro Fire Training Center again we got to see firefighters carrying out a live exercise of a fire situation, complete with the water!

Finally, at the end of our ride, I carried out my own live exercise of a different kind to get some respite from the sun.

link Longmont

The original intention of this ride was a near unthinkable Denver to Fort Collins. At 70 miles it was close to twice the distance of my previous record… the 43 mile ride to Castle Rock just weeks before. But with a much more favorable grade and cooler temps I believed we could do it if we started early.

We made great time and even arrived in Longmont by 2PM. I used the opportunity to see one of the most famous urban exploration sites in Colorado; the Longmont sugar mill.

We decided, after grabbing a sandwich, to head back. Reasoning being that we were certainly capable of reaching Fort Collins but we’d be arriving in darkness on an unfamiliar county road. Reason won out and we began our return.

Music Source: Squarepusher - My Red Hot Car (Girl)

An especially funny thing I saw on the way back was a sign for Disk Drive, pointing down a pretty empty road. I learned later this was the location of StorageTek’s headquarters, a company that specialized in tape reading and writing. It has since been acquired by Oracle, but the old headquarters is long gone, with this funny street sign serving as a reminder.

This ride to Longmont turned out to be nearly 80 miles! My future biking plans involve more of these huge day trips but also something I’m really excited for: bikepacking, or backpacking on a bike. I have some routes planned out that I hope to be doing over the next few years.