Wednesday, September 9, 2020

September 7th. 2020-A smoky ride on the Cottonwood Trail, new section scout out

With a new forest fire burning up in northern Colorado, our sky was smoky but we needed to get in a ride as a early season COLD front from Canada would drop our temps from the high 80F's to the high 30F's starting the next day!! We decided to ride the Cottonwood Creek Trail and this time do the "new section" from Austin Bluffs to just east of Powers Blvd. on the eastern side of  Colorado Springs, CO.  The trail starts at the junction of the Pikes Peak Greenway and the CC Trail then heads east up to the Cottonwood Recreation Area Park and beyond. 



 

The trail is very scenic with several low falls along Cottonwood Creek and lot's of little bridge crossings but it's a constant uphill grade all the way to Austin Bluff's and Woodman Ave. were the newer section of concrete trail continues and is more "rolling hills". There is NO shade on the new section so it can get hot! As stated we rode to the end of the new concrete, you can go further up to Tutt Ave. via a dirt trail but LOL, we don't do DIRT! ;) So we turned around and headed for CWR Park to eat our brown bag lunch and take a break. Now the FUN starts as all that uphill grade is now mostly down hill and with the smooth concrete it can be quite fast heading west towards down town! 

Our lunch stop at the lone picnic table in the Park

 

On the way back on the CCT to the PPGW we decided to stop and take a photo of the "man made" pooling area along Monument Creek along the Greenway.


Sadly the smoky sky was getting worse so we decided to head back to the storage unit and call it a day! Round Trip: 20-25 miles, 88F, very little breeze, a fun ride and JoLynn finally got a chance to ride the new section of the CCT so now the trikes are tucked in and we await the COLD and SNOW on Tue/Wed, arrugh, it's just TOO EARLY for this level of COLD, come back summer!! :)






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