After taking a week off from riding, we eased back in with a gravel ride from our boondocking spot out along the west side of Palisades Reservoir. Our ride was an out and back of 22.4 miles with 2090′ of climbing.
The ride starts on the paved road up to the turn off to Calamity Point Campground. The climb is about 3 miles and not very steep at an average of 4.4% though it does kick up to 15.2% at one point. It’s nice a shady and the traffic was really minimal on a weekday. After turning right at the junction onto gravel Bear Creek Road, the ride got faster with long rolling sections. The road is high up above the reservoir and in a couple spots you get good glimpses of the water way below. It’s heavily treed back here and signs warned against bear and even moose though we saw neither.
After passing the trailhead to Bear Creek Trail we came to the intersection of Red Spring Creek, Bear Creek, and Elk Creek. The gravel narrows here and heads up the valley. One could theoretically ride all the way to the other end of the reservoir by Alpine Wyoming and I’m sure it would be an awesome gravel ride. Instead, we turned around after a couple miles and headed back.
On the way back we detoured down to Tissue Point Boating Site to watch the eagles. Yes! There were four eagles when we first got there but they spooked and all but one flew off. None of our pictures turned out that great but it was awesome to see them all in one spot.
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