I had a really smoky ride today. It was somewhat smoky when I started but after I came out of the Eisenhower tunnel under the continental divide, heading to Lake Dillon/Silverthorne, it became much worse. As I headed north towards Kremmling the whole valley was socked in. Could barely see the west side mountains. I got to my turn off at Williams Peak rd and headed in.
The road heads off towards the little dark peak about a 1/3 of the way from the rh side. The road ends up on the far peak ridge, but dead ends on all of the legs I tried to follow.
The valley floor, up to about the base of the small peak is all dried out clay. It is also very rutted. I would not want to be there if it was raining. There were lots of skid marks imbedded in the clay from 4x vehicles. As I was negotiating one of those ruts, the front tire did what is was supposed to do, but the back tire decided that it didn't want to go across, but continue on up the rut sideways. All of sudden it grabs traction and the bike does a 90 deg turn towards the edge of the road. As you might know, when these heavy bikes decide go somewhere on their own, it is hard to stop them. Thankfully I was able to keep the bike upright but wound up with the bike going up the embankment. The front tire was at the top, but the rear was now in a little gully and I could not get enough leverage to roll the bike back while seated. I had to get off the bike & kind of lift the rear and push/pull at the same time to get it back on the road. I'm lucky there wasn't one of the below canyons there too.
This is looking down where I took the above picture. That is a size 13 boot in the hole, with the depth being about 1 1/2 to 2 ft. There were lots of these all over the road going in different directions and angles, probably because of all the monsoon rains we they have had there. This is not to far away from the east end of the Glenwood canyon that has been shut down because of the landslides.
Here is another one. Some of these gulley's are pushing 3-4 ft deep.
This is looking down from farther up the trail. The road I came in on is just to the right of the frame. You can just make out
the white line of the highway. You can also barely make out GreenMountain reservoir on the lh side. This is the little dark peak that I mention in the first picture. Above here the road turns more rocky, with no clay.
At one point almost at the top, it starts following the power lines for a short distance. This is looking back down the trail.
One last shot from the top looking towards GreenMountain reservoir. This would be a beautiful ride on a clear day.
There is a big mountain range behind the reservoir hidden in the smoke.
I went back down, back tracked to the Ute pass road & headed over to the Lake Evelyn trailhead thinking the lake would be right there. It wasn't, so no pictures of the lake. Looking at this map, I see that this trailhead was just on the other side of the mountain to the west of where I was early last year on another dead end road.
The road to the lake was pretty decent. It's far enough from any town, that it doesn't appear to get much traffic.
After the Lake Evelyn side trip, I head over to Winter Park via dirt roads for lunch and head home.