In the continuing effort to bring you video tours of Salida’s mountain bike trails, it is with great pleasure I present a look what I’m pretty sure is the biggest loop you can do on a bike on the Methodist Mountain side of Salida.
It includes all three rainbow trails, the Rainbow, Little Rainbow and Double Rainbow, as well as a couple of uniquely fun trails, the mythological trail that only goes downhill — the unicorns in this somewhat strained metaphor — all strung together in one giant loop. It’s the exact same route we did for the 2021 Banana Belt race.
But first, a few words about the trails in the video:
Rainbow Trail
The Rainbow Trail is one of Colorado’s iconic, long-distance trails and the main reason for doing this ride. It runs 105 miles from Silver Creek on the west, across Methodist Mountain, and along the east side of the Sangre de Cristo range to few miles south of Music Pass.
If you ride the full Monarch Crest, the last trail you do is the western-most segment of the Rainbow trail. The Rainbow Trail is a U.S. Forest Service trail, not part of the local Salida Mountain Trails system but the local trails connect to it and the SMT folks do maintenance on the sections closest to town.
The Rainbow Trail is a great ride but motorcycles are allowed on it so not all sections are bike friendly and with heavy summer traffic it tends to get chewed up. Horsepower, combined with big, knobby tires churn up rocks on a dirt trail. Depending on conditions, it can be challenging to ride on a bike. It’s still early in the season so the day I rode it, the trail was in generally good shape.
The views of the Arkansas River valley from the Rainbow are spectacular.
Little Rainbow
The Little Rainbow is the primary trail in the local Methodist Mountain trail system. Most trails in the Methodist system connect to the Little Rainbow. It runs parallel to the Rainbow Trail at a lower altitude — the Rainbow trail is at 8,800 – 9,000 feet, the Little Rainbow is at 7,600 – 7,800 feet — and is, obviously, much shorter.
Double Rainbow
The Double Rainbow is at the far west end of the Methodist Trail system. It connects the Little Rainbow to Forest Service Road 124 and Pot-O-Gold.
The unicorns:
Lost
Probably the steepest non-black trail in the Salida Mountain Trail system. Lots of interesting natural terrain features combined with sections of linked bermed turns. Downhill only.
Pot-O-Gold
At three miles, one of the longest single trails in the Salida Mountain Trail system. It links the Rainbow trail at 9,000 feet to the Double Rainbow at 8,000 feet. It’s designed to be ridden downhill but it can be climbed to ride this loop in a counterclockwise direction.
And one more note. Due to operator error, the video cuts off just before the end of the Double Rainbow. The GoPro works with voice commands, which is cool technology, but sometimes while flying down a bumpy trail in the wind, “GoPro start recording!” sounds a lot like “GoPro stop recording!” and unless I pay attention to the feedback beeps the camera provides it may not be in the mode I think it is. As a result, I end up missing things, like the entire end of this ride.
But in this case, that’s a good thing. The ride took me 3.5 hours to complete. Even with edits, that’s going to be way more video than anyone wants to sit through. So, my technological incompetence is your attention span’s benefit. I think the video captures the highlights of this very cool ride. Besides, the trails I missed were featured in an earlier video. Just imagine the trails in May with no snow and more greenery.
Even truncated, it’s still a long video, so grab some popcorn, put away your phone (unless you’re reading this on your phone right now) and settle in.
For those of you interested in the complete trail list, here you go, in the order I rode them:
- Little Rainbow
- Lost
- Highway 50
- Country Road 101/49
- Rainbow Trail
- Pot-O-Gold
- Double Rainbow
- Spartan West
- Spartan East
- Little Rainbow