I rocked the Rockies!

I could basically sum up the past few days with the words Colorado is
freakin awesome. We've been in the rocky mountains for about a week
now and it's been absolutely incredible. At the beginning of the trip
I would have never thought that I would ever like climbing up a
mountain, but now I absolutely love it. The views have been amazing,
and the descents down are sooo much fun. This past ride going into
Durango, I hit my top speed of the trip at 53.4 mph. It was going
straight down a 7% grade (no curves), standing up, leaning forward,
and tucked in. It was awesome, although I don't know if I'll ever be
able to do that again.

These past few days we've biked from Gunnison to Ouray, which was an
absolutely gorgeous ride. This was our last planned century ride, and
it had a couple of climbs early on, nothing too terrible. Before we
got in anna, Neel, Bennett, and I went swimming in the river right by
the road. Ouray was a really cool town, very touristy, but also
absolutely beautiful. It's hard to describe all these places, not even
the pictures do it justice.

We left Ouray to head to Durango. As soon as we left the church we
started our climb to about 11,100 ft for about 12 miles. One of my
favorite parts of this ride was seeing all of these giant natural
waterfalls on the side of the mountain. It was also a bit scary at
times because it was one of those mountains with no guard rail and
just dropped right down. When we got to the top we dropped another
3,000 ft and climbed back up to approx 10,000 ft for 7 miles, then we
dropped again and did our last climb to another 10,000 ft for about 3
miles, and then... it was 30 miles down hill. It was a hard day, but
so fun. I rode with cindy the whole day and had a blast, we were
straight up jammin on those mountains.

Today we had a build day in Durango and worked on a duplex with
habitat and ameri cor. We painted the outside, did installation, and
amanda and I got to put on the last piece of siding for the house. The
rest of the day we had a BBQ with some of the locals, went for a walk
by the river, and just hung out.