First Bike Ride of Spring Time

This message is slightly belated but because the wonder of this particular bike ride it stands out in my mind.
On April 9 it was a gorgeous Friday amidst a week that had begun with snow and ice. I set out on the Boulder Creek Path with Cait and Cameron to meander around the city's extensive network of bike paths on a cool evening. We took off from downtown and headed east towards the mountains then north along the city limits of Boulder to Wonderland Lake, down the North Foothills' short mountain-biking terrain along the continental divide to highway 36 then a huge loop into southeast Boulder before returning to downtown. The first glimmer of spring on what had been a warm, cloudless day had not gone unnoticed only by the three bikers who had set out to get some exercise. The paths were teeming with runners and bikers who all wore smiles as big as ours while having the rare late-winter Friday opportunity to shirk some commitments to be outdoors.

But it wasn't only the people who caught my attention today. The paths were loud. The foothills were loud. The lake was roaring. Every animal who had been cooped or otherwise occupied with surviving during the winter came out to celebrate. Every single bird in the city was hanging out near the creek paths and the lake trying to get some action by going through every single bird call in their repertory. One of the more stand-out birds I saw singing away in a tree was a stellar example of a Bullock's Oriole. Birds could be seen flying around with sticks and twigs and entering trees to build nests while others were cheerily searching for a partner with whom to share the nest.
Larger animals certainly caught our attention as we rode by. We spotted a coyote near Goose Creek, some deer near the South Boulder Creek and even a beaver swimming around KOA lake.

The ride itself could be described as pure enjoyment. The paths are not designed to have ridiculous hills, the mountain biking paths do not have long rock gardens. It also proved to be enough exercise to prevent my legs from rotting off due to a week's worth of inactivity.

Route - Click the Bicycle symbol to see the route

Bikes, People, Scenery, and the Great Outdoors

Occasionally certain periods of time require special documentation - this is one of those times. After graduating with a degree in engineering, there is an immense amount of steam that has been built up from spending countless hours hunched over enormous 20-pound books in poorly ventilated computer labs with no windows. These hours included times where I would sit often with a perplexed look on my faces, sometimes shouting obscenities when, at 2 in the morning, after working 6 to 8 hours straight on writing five pages of differential calculus combined with chemistry kinetics I would still not have an acceptable answer. I am not the only one who would enter the windowless labs on a day that announced itself to be gorgeous, and wouldn't leave the building until late at night when a nighttime snow storm would be taking place.

This blog will detail the exact opposite of the aforementioned scenario: it involves bikes, people, scenery, and the great outdoors.