Leaving Steamboat Springs this morning Ash treated us to breakfast at a place called Freshies as the hotel breakfast was a little bit lacking. Afterwards, we made our way to a Safeway market and bought sandwiches to bring along on the trail to eat later.

 

 

The first part of the ride out of Steamboat Springs happens fairly quickly, just just outside of town and runs out through some open meadow, then starts to follow the Yampa River. It's beautiful rolling country with some big fancy houses, lots of nice scenery, a very popular recreational area with bicyclists and swimmers in the river and the lakes along the way.

 

 

From there, the road follows a long valley with a small section of river which runs alongside it for quite a ways. It's a gentle unpaved ride, lots of aspen trees and wonderful smelling pines along the way. We passed an old stagecoach stop and then the largest water crossing of the trip which is really no big deal at this time of year, just a pretty big deep puddle. No one had any problems with that.

 

 

Leaving the river the road got a little rougher becoming  much more rolling and steeper in places with a few rocky climbs. It brought us to brought us to a large mesa above Radium, Colorado, one of my favorite scenic stops. The views from here are absolutely spectacular. It overlooks the Colorado River and it's surrounded by mountains on every horizon. We got some good pictures.

 

 

The road then descends down to the Colorado River, crosses it, and for the most of the rest of the afternoon we rode alongside the river. We made a brief lunch stop at one of the many campgrounds and rafting put-ins along the way to eat our sandwiches and get some cold drinks.

Continuing along the river, we made great time on a very smooth flat wide gravel road which brought us to Gypsum Road. Gypsum Road can be fairly benign, very dusty, impassable when wet, and absolutely a handful when extremely dry and filled with huge pits of gypsum dust. Today we were lucky. The road was in fantastic shape and we rolled on through to arrive fairly early in the afternoon at Eagle, so early the motel was not ready for us to come in. We had to kill some time in the parking lot until our rooms opened at 3:00 p.m. but plenty of cold beer helped.

 

 

Dinner tonight was at Moe's BBQ, a couple miles down the road. We piled in the van in shifts and ferried back and forth to enjoy the barbecue outside in the hot sun. The place was crowded, there weren't enough tables, but the food was pretty good.

 

 

Everyone's a little tired after today and tomorrow is a big day. We go from Eagle to Buena Vista and we cross two 12,000 ft passes on the way. This is going to be the first really rocky steep sections that we hit, and nerves are a little excited thinking about it. I'm hoping to get some great photos and that no one has any issues along the way.