Day 7 – Alamosa to Pagosa Springs
The final day of the tour turned out to be one of the most fun, thanks largely to Mother Nature cooperating with favorable wind conditions. We road north from Alamosa up to the San Luis Valley to Pocha Pass before descending into Salida.
What is amazing about this route is just how incredibly flat the road is. For the first 40 miles we gained 30 ft – yes, 30. With a tailwind, this meant nice, fast speeds of over 20 mph even while soft pedaling, and over 25 mph with a little bit of effort.
Once the valley began to narrow and we began to ascend towards Pocha Pass, we added only 1,600 ft of elevation gain over the next 20 miles. The climb up Poncha Pass from the south is amazing in that you don’t really feel like you are going up a mountain pass at all. Once you begin your descent, however, it is a totally different story.
The descent off Poncha Pass into Salida was a nice, steep grade to keep the speeds up. I hit my top speed of any of the descents during the tour right at 50 mph, or 80 kph.
Day 7 took me 5 hours 27 minutes total time, with 4 hours 22 minutes on the bike. I did 2,171 kJ of work with a TSS of 178 and 1,753 ft of total elevation gain over 85 miles.
Once in Salida, it was time to disassemble and box up my bike, find a cold shower and hot food, and then wait for the bus that returned me to Denver for my plane ride home the next morning.
Thanks for your review. I’ve done 2 BTC’s (2008,2009), but no RTR.
I’m considering doing either the BTC or RTR (but not both) in 2011.
Based on your experiences, would you recommend 1 of these tours over the other, and the reason(s) you might prefer one over the other?
Since the RTR is a lottery, I would sign-up for that one and if you didn’t get in then do the BTC. If you haven’t done the RTR it’s worth doing, but it’s not a ton better than the BTC. The RTR organization is definitely more professional than the BTC, but it’s not like that winds up being a big difference, in the end.
Also I think it would depend upon the route next year – if the RTR is another hard route in 2011, that’s fantastic – if it’s an easy route like 2009, eh, skip it.
But, doing both would be even more fun!
@Frank
Another tour to consider is Colorado Rocky Mountain Bicycle Tour. Check out this years route at crmbt.com. We went to Mt. Evans and Trail Ridge Road both. I also rode it in 2008 & 2009 and loved the routes.
Before that I’d ridden 5 BTC events. The biggest difference is touring with 250 people on CRMBT as opposed to 2,000 in the big tours. When you arrive and start looking for food, it’s much easier to find a place to eat. Also CRMBT usually overnights in places that have some restaurants and motels.
CRMBT is also the first week in August if that fits your schedule. And it has always been a loop.
I always stayed in motels so can’t speak to the camping situation except they seemed to stay near schools like the big tours.
To me the #1 consideration has been the route so this gives you another choice.
[...] June, 2010, I rode the wonderful Ride the Rockies event in Colorado and used the ForeRunner 310XT to track the entire week of riding. One problem I [...]
Just seeing your blog-I was there with you and thoroughly enjoyed the week. We were probably up on the Monument about the same time. I would totally agree with the bumpy section of road from Delta to Ouray-plus it was just a grind getting to Ouray as it was a slight uphill grade the last half.
Your favorite climb was the only spot I had issues that week. I didn’t realize I had not eaten enough and just totally bonked riding out of Silverton. Somehow I made it to the top and got a Coke and some sugar and revived. Each day afterwards I made sure I stopped and ate pancakes at the 1st rest stop-those were great!
If you had ridden into Pagosa you might have hit a faster speed for the week. That was one wickedly fast descent for a good stretch heading into town.
Had to love that last day after all the hills we did the week before!!
Hope to see you out there next year.
I do wish I would have ridden the Pagosa Springs day in retrospect, but it is really easy to say that now from the comfort of the back patio when nothing is sore!
I’m not sure if I’m going to try for the RTR again, or the BTC, or some other fun event, but riding in Colorado, somewhere, is definitely on the schedule.