Another day in the mountains...

Dad, Jonathan, and I got an early start (well, we attempted at starting earlier but I don't think we really did) and drove over one pass to outside of a small town where we would be starting today's ride. We knew what we were getting ourselves into because we had driven over Ebbetts Pass yesterday on the way to Calaveras State Park. Driving on that narrow two lane road (not wide enough for a yellow line down the middle though), we were a bit terrified. There were switchbacks where it looked the road disappeared and all you could see was mountain and valley. Needless to say, we were slightly apprehensive about the difficulty of the ride. It was about a 16 mile (mostly uphill) ride to where the road got steep. At that point, we had about 7 miles to the top. The 16 mile approach was very nice though--beautiful scenery with the road winding along the Carson River and a nice easy gradient--we were all in our small ring however.

When we started the climb, it was quite steep and reminded us of the start of Alpe d'huez but the rest wasn't that bad (not too terrible). There were sections that allowed us to recover after the steep parts and there were very few places where I had to stand. After the 8000 ft mark, we started riding past snow and eventually got to a lovely mountain lake. The summit was not far from there where we met a few local riders who were coming up from the other side of Ebbetts Pass. One asked Jonathan, "Those wheels look interesting--How do you like them?" Jonathan replied that he was a little biased but he liked them a lot (all three of us are riding on Revolution Wheelworks wheels).

After our obligatory picture with the sign at the top, we made our way back down. Descending is definitely not my skill so it was slow going. We paused for a variety of photo opportunities as well. Those 16 miles of uphill that we started with turned out to be a very pleasant downhill--not steep or windy--and we were able to make it back to the car in good time. The ride ended up being about 45 miles which we did in 3 and a half hours.

With the holiday weekend here, traffic is crazy. The locals at the top of the pass gave us some good non-traffic routes to try so hopefully we'll be successful in finding those tomorrow.