Trailhead condition requests, questions, alerts, etc.
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It's been a light hiking year around my house due to my husband having knee surgery this past winter. He's working back into various activities, mainly mountain biking, but hasn't gotten to the point where he feels comfortable pounding away on a trail just yet.
My question is - which 14ers have bike trails from the same trailhead as the peak? I'd love to find one for us this weekend where we could go camp together, I could grab a peak the following day and he could mtn bike from the same location. I'll be doing some research myself but I thought you guys might be a great option for that sort of thing
lpeabbles wrote:It's been a light hiking year around my house due to my husband having knee surgery this past winter. He's working back into various activities, mainly mountain biking, but hasn't gotten to the point where he feels comfortable pounding away on a trail just yet.
My question is - which 14ers have bike trails from the same trailhead as the peak? I'd love to find one for us this weekend where we could go camp together, I could grab a peak the following day and he could mtn bike from the same location. I'll be doing some research myself but I thought you guys might be a great option for that sort of thing
Thanks in advance!
You can start by looking for any 14er not in a wilderness area - or at least a good portion of its trail isn't. That's really the only caveat I can think of where you wouldn't be able to mountain bike, trail difficulty notwithstanding. There are a good number of ones in the collegiate peaks, sawatch range that are mountain bikeable. Antero, comes to mind. The road up Princeton would be a good one I believe.
The Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race and Trail 10K is this weekend. Just a heads up if you were thinking about doing any peaks in Leadville.
Mountain biking and climbing near Peru Creek in Summit will be my suggestion. You can hike Grays and Torreys, and he can go crazy on the trails and roads.
Check out Peru Creek Trail System, Argentine Pass, Chihuahua Lake/Road, or any other Montezuma Trail on that link if that is something you're interested in doing. It's all accessible from Peru Creek!
"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift." PRE
The largest criteria for finding a trailhead is to check if it is in wilderness or not. No bikes are allowed on trails in a designated wilderness. That being said, all of the sawatch peaks outside of a wilderness zone (Elbert, Princeton, Antero, Shav/Tab), are all near the Colorado Trail, allowing biking. As for peaks in the front, sangre, or san juan, range, I don't know the areas that well to think of a place to bike, but there sure might be spots.
The Peru Creek suggestion is a great one, great riding and options for distances, as is CO trail access in the Sawatch.
More specifically for Sawatch (while avoiding the Leadville Trail race area), we did a fun combo of Mt. Princeton with some biking on the CO trail (and some of the dirt road).
For clarification, the bike race doesn't go on the Colorado Trail, so Elbert would still be doable. Leadville and the surrounding area might extremely busy and miserable though.
