Frying Pan Road Ride
Yesterday we rode the Frying Pan Road starting from the Basalt (CO) till the end of the pavement and back - a total of approximately 74 miles.
The town of Basalt is at 6400ft. We started at around 8.30am, and logged a riding time of just over 5 hours. Per Sanjay’s GPS, here is the elevation profile - looks more daunting in this profile than it felt on the road.
The best of this route was that most of the traffic ends mid way at the Ruedi Dam. We had to be careful with the boat-lovers heading towards this dam. The first real climb starts just before the dam, and summits at 8500ft. There were some steep sections along the way as you can see from the profile. From here, the route descends steeply into the town of Meredith. The road surface get rougher from here.
Meredith a tiny hamlet at 7700ft. It has a small convenience store for supplies, and free water (from a tap outside). With the temperatures climbing, it turned out to be good idea to fill up here. After Meredith, this road starts climbing gently all the way till we reached about 9000ft, and I managed a respectable 12.5mph average during this climb. As per Road Biking Colorado, the pavement was supposed to end after 2 more miles at about 10000ft. As we started getting ready to climb the final two miles, we hit the disappointment of the day. After a sharp and short switchback, we found the pavement ending abruptly leading to a fork of dirt roads. So we had to turn back at about 9250ft.
As we started the descent, we noticed winds building up slowly. On the way back, we stopped at the Meredith store again for a quick snack and fill up. The climb to the first summit from this side turned out be a bit steeper than the other side, and I made good use of the granny gear (i.e. 34-27) for this part.
From here, the descent to Basalt turned out be brutal due to heavy head winds. We tried maintaining a pace line for the next several miles, but the winds made us ride harder.
Overall, this turned out be a very good training ride over 76 miles. Per Sanjay, the total elevation gain was an impressive 5364ft. With this ride, my odometer reached 1100 miles for 2007.
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