It's too bad the smell of fresh mountain air, cleaned by a recent rain/snowstorm, can't be captured and transmitted digitally.

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Below is a kernel-density map showing where and how often I've ridden my bike around Boulder in the last year and a half. I've posted things like this before for my rides in California. The color map (the legend is in the bottom-left corner) indicates that anywhere there's a green dot, I've cycled through there at most a few times, and anything between blue and purple are my usual routes. There are a few red points mainly centered around where I live, which corresponds to places I've been through a few hundreds of times.

Looking at the map, I'm a bit surprised at the amount of exploring I've done out in the plains. I didn't realize I had done that much out there. I also want to note that most of the dead-end segments are due to geography - the roads end where the segments do.

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The view from the Peak to Peak highway. You can click on the image to find the full-sized version, and I highly recommend you do!

Fall has hit the Front Range, and the Aspen trees are showing it. I took these photos on my bike ride today, and I could have taken dozens more, but I would have never made it back home! I wasn't the only one out there admiring the fall foliage - traffic was about as busy as I've ever seen it, and I saw many people pulled off to the sides of the roads taking pictures of the trees and views.

Since most of you cannot be like all the people I saw today and admire the views in person, here are some of the more spectacular views I felt were worth stopping for and sharing.

Riverside Drive past Raymond. This is one of my favorite roads in this area. It takes 2 hours to get to, and it's over 7500 feet in elevation, but it looks like this the whole way.

A panorama of Riverside Drive between Riverside and Raymond. Happily, even today the road had almost no traffic. Again, you should look at the full-sized version!

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Heading west on my ride yesterday I saw this curtain of rain falling in the distance. As it happened, I was riding west and I did get rained on by this front a few minutes after taking this picture. It wasn't too bad, just enough to get my legs dirty from spray off my front wheel, mostly.

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Seen today from Betasso Preserve on my bike ride. There was no rain or visible lightning, but there was some wind and thunder.

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This view is from Walker Ranch taken today, roughly in the center of this map looking south. If you look to the upper right, you can see a few rail cars on the railroad tracks. The tracks lead to the high altitude Moffat Tunnel.

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Yesterday the Valmont Mountain Bike Park opened up to the public, and today I went over to check it out. The park has been discussed for many years, and developed over the last few, so it's quite a moment for cyclists in Boulder. The park is oriented towards rider development of all ages. Each type of feature, such as cross-country or aerial areas, have options targeted towards riders of all ability levels. And even if you get yourself into something you can't handle, there are bailout options to get around things.

Dirt Jumps in the foreground, Boulder in the background.

The park is quite extensive and the designers have taken advantage of all the space they had available. Each trail feature is accessible by shared bike/walk trails, so parents can keep an eye on their kids even if they aren't on a bike. Running down the middle of the park are two irrigation ditches (which is a crude description of them, they are much nicer than that) which splits the park into smaller sections. The smaller sections keeps things more intimate which is good in a park that will tend to get very busy. Nearly all of the single track trails are one way, which is very nice. Right now the vegetation is low so it actually isn't a huge problem, but it is always very startling to come around a corner upon someone coming the other way.

A small section of the park. Click for the full PDF of the trails.

To be honest, much of the park makes me feel like I have no skillz (yes, that's skills with a "z"). Even the Skillz Loop, which is designed to be a place to learn skillz without being pressured by better riders to get out of the way challenges me. I tried most of the trails today, but not all of the technical options, especially stuff like this:

The park has two pump tracks, and I had fun riding one of them (Mesa Top) many times. The other one (Creekside) I did once, but it was very muddy and I didn't want to ruin the pump track or get any dirtier than I was already.

The Mesa Top Pump Park

I'm really excited about this new facility, and I hope to slowly improve my skillz over time at the park. It's only a couple kilometers away from where we live, so it's really convenient even if I only have an hour free. My only complaint right now about the park is it's clear they haven't quite figured out how to do the drainage from the sprinklers, because there are more than a few muddy spots around the park that contribute to trail destruction at an accelerated pace.

The Corkscrew, with steeply banked corners, viewed from the top.

The Slopestyle aerial trails area.

Someday this could be me!

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Taken today on the bridge in the middle of this Google Map view.

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Taken yesterday on the Betasso Link Trail to the Betasso Preserve above Boulder at about 2000m/6600ft. The CU Campus is visible in the gap at the bottom of the canyon. The horizontal color gradient is due to different exposures & white balances for the individual pictures that make up the panorama. I could probably fix it, but it's OK. As always, click above to enbiggen. Here's the GPS track of the ride.

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Above is a plot showing how many hours I have logged on my Garmin GPS devices since I got my first one in April 2005. This is mostly cycling, but also walking, running and some hiking. However, this is not a true measure of my physical activity over this period because it is missing data. Up to late 2007, I was active on the velodrome, and I didn't bother using my GPS there. In the last year, I've tried to walk to school more often, and for the most part I haven't used my Garmin on those walks. But it does capture the majority of my physical activity, which is road and mountain biking, where I always use a GPS.

In green I've over-plotted a linear fit to the data. I have chosen a linear fit as it shows the overall trend in the clearest way possible. For some reason, June 2006 shows zero hours, which I believe to be wrong. I can't believe I did nothing at all during any summer month in 2006. Therefore, for purposes of the fit, I have given that month the average hours of the four bracketing months.

Even knowing that lots of data is missing from both the front- and back-ends of the figure, it is still clear what the overall trend was. Down - down significantly from nearly 30 hours a month five years ago to just above 10. There of course is a great variability from month to month, but the fit shows clearly the overall trend of what trying to finish graduate school does to physical activity.

I find the lack of patterns interesting. Some years, I really struggled to stay active during the late fall, which makes a certain amount of sense when weather and schoolwork is factored in. However, other years it apparently didn't affect me at all. The bounce in hours since October 2010 makes sense because that's when I graduated, but the two months in 2010 with 25+ hours is confusing. I can't remember how I achieved that!

Nerd time: I made the figure in Python using matplotlib and numpy. Excel is for suckers!

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Not too shabby! Beyond this are sustained 10%+ grades on Sunshine Canyon. Ouch!

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Here are some pictures I took on my mountain bike ride on Thursday, two days ago, from the Flatirons Vista Trails south of Boulder. The trails are decent single track that is just a bit more bumpy than I like (this kind of bumpy is not the same as technical, it's just annoying). If I had a full-suspension bike I would probably not find the bumpiness so grating. Indeed, most of the riders I saw on the trails had a full-suspension bike.

The weather lately has been dry and mild, as the photos show. The autumn precipitation so far in Boulder is well below seasonal averages. In contrast, apparently the high mountains have been dumped with snow all fall. I guess I brought some San Diego with me to Boulder.

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Image location

Today was my first official day of my postdoc position. Naturally, like most people would, I skipped out early to go ride my bike. It makes more sense once you know that for the last month and a half, I haven't gone for a bike ride because I haven't had health insurance. Not being insured made bike riding a risky proposition. As a result, I've also been walking to school and back which takes 40+ minutes each way, in comparison to the 10 minutes it takes on a bike. Today was my first opportunity to ride my bike, and it was sunny and relatively warm, so I wasn't going to pass it up. In addition, I've basically been doing this job for over a month already, so the first-day impression came long ago.

Today's ride was a bit of exploration, and very autumnal, as the photo above proves. If you look carefully, you can see some snow on the highest peaks. It was also my first opportunity to use my new Garmin Edge 705, which was a graduation present from various Ruggles. My legs definitely exhibited the effects of no bike riding -; they got tired very quickly.

Finally, happy November!

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Today I rode "Super Walker" which means that I did the Walker Ranch loop starting from town rather than the trail head. It turns out that the ride really is super, and there is a huge amount of climbing. Over 5000 feet of climbing in 30 miles.

I am going to brag again about how amazing cycling is here, and show some more photos of some of the ride today. You may click on them to enlarge them. Below is South Boulder Creek, which a couple parts of the loop crosses and parallels. The water was moving at a good clip!

A view looking North-West from one of the ridge lines the trail follows.

This is looking roughly East, down into the plains South of Boulder in front of the mountains.

Often times, the warning signs along trails are overly-cautious. It's not that I think they don't apply to me, but once I've ridden a trail a few times, I can judge for myself how technical the trail is, or how fast to take a corner. As long as there is no one else on the trail, and I can see far enough forward to be safe, I go my own speed. On this trail, however, I do not have experience, so I decided to heed the warning.

This is one case where the warning sign is correct. These are the stairs immediately after the sign that are significantly steeper, with bigger vertical step sizes, than most people find comfortable. It's always tough to tell how steep things are in photos, but trust me, there is no chance I'll ever ride these stairs. The stairs go down to the canyon floor which has been carved by South Boulder Creek, and is very steep and rocky (as can be seen) on both sides. But the scenery is fantastic, so the inconvenience of the stairs is worth it!

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It has been nearly a month a half since my last post about leaving San Diego, and we've finally made it to Boulder! Ok, actually it didn't take that long. It took us two days, with a stop overnight in Saint George, Utah. The long gap in posting is due to how busy I've been here in Boulder, which has been nearly entirely due to getting my thesis done, but also to a good deal of work getting the new apartment put together. Those things deserve their own posts, which may or may not happen.

What I would like to post here are some pictures I took on my bike ride yesterday. I am 99.7% done with the draft of my thesis which I'm sending to my advisors this weekend, so I figured I could take some time to ride my bike recreationally. This is a novelty for me recently. Come wintertime, I'm definitely going to miss the weather in San Diego, but right now, cycling here definitely beats San Diego. It takes less than ten minutes to get out of town onto roads like this:

or this:

or this where it feels like I can see all the way to Kansas over the plains:

I just wanted to share. Hopefully, now that the bulk of the thesis is done, I can enjoy this area a bit before winter hits!

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