Great Ride in Fruita

Colorado River. Horsethief Bench, Fruita, CO

The portage.  Riding down was no easier.

As we rolled into the Rabbit Valley Rec area in Fruita, CO we thought we had the entire park to ourselves.  It was dark with no lights to be seen anywhere.  We snaked through the roads to the campsite and as we pulled in we saw another tent up across from our site.  We set up in the dark as our neighbor came over and introduced herself.  Her name was Atheena, and she had been a schoolteacher in Basalt, outside of Aspen.  Her time had run out and there was no job for her anymore so she had been living out of her car for a while and just driving around biking and looking for fresh powder to ski.  Her final objective was Jackson, Wyoming for the winter, but she had camped in Fruita to ride the trails there for a few days.  We hung out for a bit and decided to go riding together in the morning.
Next morning we awoke to a warm sunny day.  We broke camp and went one exit down I-70 to the Loma exit.  There was a trailhead there with ridiculous mountain bike trails everywhere.  My buddy Matt who lives in Rollinsville, CO had recommended a trail there called Horsethief Bench.  He ranked it as one of his top 5 all time great rides so I thought we should hit that one.  He was right.
Horsethief Bench climbs a 4WD trail to the top of a mesa and then runs right along the edge through flowy fast singletrack for a few miles.  The mesa overlooks the Colorado River and the scenery was so spectacular we actually wrecked a few times because we weren't watching the trail.  There is a really technical section that could be considered unridable, but we tried anyway.  We didn't make it far.  The map we had says to portage your bikes through this section, and that's what we ended up doing.

After the ride we said goodbye to Atheena and added her to a very long list of very cool people we met on this trip.  She headed north to Jackson and we headed west to Matt's house.  Matt is an old friend of mine from NOVA who I used to bike and climb with often.  He lives with his wife and two dogs on the side of a mountain in the very rural town of Rollinsville, CO.  The town is about ten miles north of Blackhawk, a casino resort town that looks like a tiny old west version of Vegas.

Much colder in the mountains

Going east on I-70 we saw a lot of snow on the peaks that had been deposited by the same weather front that had chased us out of the state a week earlier.  We even encountered snow in the passes near Vail and Loveland.  Wolf Creek ski area had opened up two days earlier with a 40" base, so we were starting home just in time.
We made Matt's place after dark and crashed hard.  He lives at almost 9000' of elevation, and we had been riding for several straight days and our bodies were beat.  That didn't stop us from one more ride though!