On Thursday I played hooky from work so I could get in some early season mountain biking. I say "played hooky" but I went through the proper channels to request the day off because I knew that calling out sick would result in a bad sunburn or a torn ACL, which might lead to me getting fired, and that would really suck. Using vacation time for a random day off in the middle of the week to recreate still feels thrilling and I highly recommend it.
Throughout the day I couldn't help but think about what I would be doing if I were in the office. When normally I would have been settling into my work routine at 7 a.m. I was eating a mediocre continental breakfast at the hotel. An hour later, instead of wandering over to the copy machine to pick something up I had printed I was at Walmart picking up an extra bike tire tube. And by my mid-morning break time I was bouncing along the mountain bike trails of Oil Well Flats under a beautiful blue sky, living the American dream.
Christi had read about Oil Well Flats several weeks before and had convinced me to go, which didn't take much arm-twisting. It never does. Just 7.5 miles north of Canon City, the recreation area boasts super fun single track trails for mountain bikers, hikers, and horseback riders. The trails wind through pinyon-juniper woodlands, over slabs of Cretaceous sedimentary rock, and next to countless populations of cactus, each bearing threatening-looking spines. This made me grateful we had stopped by Walmart to pick up the spare bike tire tubes -- especially since we ran into exactly zero other people during the two hours we were there.
Earlier in the day, I had seen Canon City's welcome sign, which advertises "splendid climate, beautiful mountain drives & scenery." I can't vouch for the climate, but the weather was indeed splendid -- the temperature hovered around 55F and a slight breeze kept us cool the entire time.
The scenery was also quite beautiful. Below is a photo showing the high point of Oil Well Flats, called "Island in the Sky." We never summited this plateau and instead stuck to the trails in the lower-elevation area, an area which used to be a warm, shallow sea during the Cretaceous Period. Looking up at the "sky island" I could imagine dinosaurs wandering across the plateau and through tropical plant communities to reach water. How the landscape, climate, and inhabitants have changed over the past 150 million years. These are the things I think about while mountain biking.
Oil Well Flats celebrates the unique geology of the area by naming trails after geologic features: Anticline, Fracture, Unconformity, Tectonic Shift, and Island in the Sky to name a few.
Here is some cool sedimentary rock, which exhibits traces left by primitive Cretaceous organisms.
A view of the valley with the Sangre de Cristos in the background
My pet peeve: a piece of trailside trash. Don't get me started!!!
But wait, it was not trash but the most floriferous Townsendia cf. grandiflora (Easter daisy) I had ever seen. My self-righteousness was replaced by wonder.
After the Easter daisy, I couldn't help myself and started to botanize in earnest while mountain biking. Soon I saw a blur of white and knew it was the first alpine pennycress (Noccaea fendleri) I had seen in 2019, so I slammed on my brakes and went back for a photo.
I also saw Physaria somebody (bladderpod) with its lemon yellow flowers. Too bad I don't know my Physaria spp.
Here is a pretty Juniperus sp. I saw along the trail
And here are two of the many cactus plants I was thankful not to fall and impale myself on.
After a memorable morning of mountain biking/botanizing, we made the 2.5 hour drive back to Denver. We arrived home around the same time I would have, had I gone to work. But instead of being tired from sitting at my desk for 8.5 hours, I had the more satisfying kind of tired that results from hard physical activity and a good day spent in the sunshine.
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