Finally a decent day and semi melted trails to ride!

It's been really COLD since it snowed over the weekend 2 weeks ago, it didn't warm up enough to start a melt till Thursday the 19th. lucky for us Friday and Saturday stayed warmish so we decided to go try to ride a trail in Colorado Springs on Sunday Dec. 22nd. We decided to ride the Rock Island Trail as we don't get out that way often. It use to be the "normal" trail we'd take to get into Colorado Springs when we lived in town. We loaded up the truck with the trikes and headed to park at Bott Park, then we headed over to ride about 1/2 mile of the Shooks Run Trail to the "junction" with the Rock Island Trail. LOL, the junction is actually a "alley" way that has been adopted as part of the trail heading north. Well it has a lot of trees so it was still covered in 2-3 inch. deep snow, lucky for us it was still kinda firm and we have "3" wheels which makes it a bit of a slog but safer than 2 wheels on snow! We rode the 3/4 to 1 mile of the alley way and got on the actual trail, (some day the trail will be concrete and follow the old rail line to a "connector" so you can ride the RI trail clear to the Pikes Peak Greenway Trail towards down town Co. Springs), we plodded on up the trail first on the older 8 ft. wide asphalt sections (they are getting a bit rough), finally just past Union Blvd. it turns to smooth concrete 12 ft. wide, nice!

It's a trail with a lot of small steep inclines so JoLynn got to try out her new 22/32/44 triple with 155mm crank arms and LOVED the set up over the stock, 30/40/52 with 170mm crank arms! She can spin now instead of "semi-mash" the pedal stroke! The trail is only about 10-12 miles long but has great views of the Austin Bluffs area of the town, it was a nice 60F with only THIN high clouds and some SUN shine! We rode to the current end at Powers Blvd. Another someday they will either go OVER or UNDER all 8 lanes of Powers Blvd and make a connector to the old gravel trail that goes WAY out to the Eastern Plains of CO. to Western KS., sadly won't happen in our life times! We stopped at a bench and ate our brown bag lunch and headed back as the sun goes down fast this time of year! Loaded up the truck and stopped to do a bit of food shopping, then to the storage unit and tucked the trikes away as the sun went behind Cheyenne Mountain!