It’s summer, and that means it’s time to do one of my favorite in-town rides, the Cottonwood Loop. The Cottonwood Loop is in the Arkansas Hills north of Salida. From town it’s a 20-mile round trip involving an eight-mile gravel ride up to the trailhead, followed by a twelve-mile single-track descent.
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.
In 28 years of riding and racing I’ve pretty much ridden every kind of trail imaginable: ledgy limestone, chunky granite, desert sand, gnarly roots, soft loam. In terms of mountain biking, there isn’t much I haven’t seen.
I realize my posts haven’t been all that frequent lately. That’s partly due to the fact that we’ve begun to settle into our lives here in Colorado and while that’s all wonderful and good, the things we’re doing don’t nicely fit into a blog that I’m sharing with the world. And partly because, as mentioned in the previous post, the spastic weather has kept our outdoor activities local, which end up being much like the ones I’ve already talked about in previous posts. But in the past few weeks the weather has started to warm up, the intermittent snow storms have turned to intermittent rain showers and things are finally starting to turn green around here. It seems like spring is real.
Whoa, two posts in one day! Our snowshoe adventure in the previous post actually happened yesterday but I just got around to organizing photos and posting it. This happened today. I will be returning to my regular haphazard “schedule” starting in 2021 so don’t go getting used to this twice a day thing.