Day fifty nine, denver to fort collins via the rocky mountain national park

Denver and Fort Collins are about 95 kms apart straight up the interstate? Denver and Fort Collins are both veritable vipers nests when it comes to traffic congestion. Country folk like us, out for a relaxing and peaceful days ride on their motorcycles should avoid both Denver and Fort Collins peak hour traffic like the Black Plague.. Thus, being tourists from across the ditch and country folk who detest these big cities, we decided we would take the long way to Fort Collins, 312 kms in fact via Rocky Mountain National Park.

Now this means initially we had to shoot back west on the I70 50 kms to exit onto the road to allow us to do this. Fortunately some dickhead roading company had not elected to block 2 of 3 lanes on the interstate to do maintenance work in peak hour traffic today, maybe they had weet bix and were a bit sharper today, so the run down the I70 was as tolerable as it could be and once you get to about Idaho Springs the scenery is even cool.

Right, so we rip up route 40 and summit Bertold Pass at a tad over 10,000’ and carry on to Granby for a coffee. From Granby it’s onto the 34 and straight into the Rocky Mountain National Park, climbing up to the alpine visitor center at the summit, with pics at many of the overlooks. This scenery is big big country so hard to get it in a scenery shot on the phone, but you get the idea from the few below.

The road tops out at 12,183’ asl at the alpine visitors center and it was still 15 degrees up there, nice. Even rode past a whole herd of Elk sunning themselves on one of the meadow areas. I think there was a pic taken by someone from the team as well of a Moose cow with calf at foot. Nice, don’t see too many moose.

Down we go for lunch at Estes Park and then down through the Thompson canyon road into the shitfight of afternoon traffic that is Loveland, to enable us to get to another shitfight of afternoon traffic, the I25 Up the road a piece to Fort Collins, but make it we did.

Summing up, a ride that has to be done, but. Not as scenic as the Million Dollar Highway From Durango to Ouray………just saying. Any day on the motorbike in an alpine area in awesome sunshine has to be a good day.