The last time we rode this trail was a couple of years ago on our old recumbent trikes and it was a VERY ROUGH ride as the trail had 3-4 inch deep cracks covering the whole WIDTH of the trail for 4 miles out of the 8 mile trail length!! Thought we'd give it a try and see how the new bikes with their 700 C size wheels would fare. Loaded the bikes in the old truck and headed from Co. Springs up Ute Pass to Woodland Park and the Centennial Trailhead. Unloaded, headed out and wow, lot's of NEW, smooth asphalt for quite awhile but sadly it wasn't done for the whole 8 miles so we still had 2+ miles of cratered trail surface to deal with!! :( The larger 700 C wheels did help some but you still had to SLOW down to a crawl to get thru the even larger cracks! The bummer is that there are several short but STEEP segments to this trail and where you'd normally speed up on the "down hill" to help get up the steep grades, you couldn't do it, RATS!! :(
Still it's a beautiful area as the trail goes along CO. Hwy. 67 N. that goes through the Pikes Peak National Forest area. Lot's of pine and a few aspen trees mixed in. The area is close to 9000ft. altitude so we got a work out! The trail got a bit better as we neared Manitou Lake which is a CO. State Park with lake, lot's of picnic tables and nice restrooms (advised, $3.00 entry fee for bicycles). We ate our Brown Bag Lunch and took a couple of photo's of us and the lake before heading back to Woodland Park. LOL, this trail fools you as it has more down hill grade heading north so there's a LOT of steeper uphill graded sections heading south!! :O It's only 16 miles total but we both felt it as we got back to the trailhead, loaded up the bikes and headed down the pass back to the Springs!! Sunny, 65 F, slight breeze, nice day for a RIDE!! :)
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