Dadd Gulch is located 35 miles northwest of Fort Collins up the Poudre Canyon. to get there, head up 287, then turn left onto 14. it's another half hour or more from that point. the trailhead is on the left side of the road, just past indian meadows. look for the green parking symbol sign pointing to the right, the trailhead is on the opposite side of the road.
i just want to say Right Now that i do not recommend this ride unless you're, like, juli furtado or something. this trail is out of HELL, and in my opinion should be sent back. *grin* this trail is the bad version of hewlett gulch meets zimmerman trail. then again, if you're a complete animal on a bike and want to go somewhere you're almost guaranteed not to run into anyone else on the trail, this might just be for you. yeah, and if enough people ride it, it might actually become passable, yeah. so, uh, go ride it, go go go!
Dadd Gulch trail is an infrequently used single track. it starts off innocently enough, but rapidly gets ugly. there are more than a dozen stream crossings, one of which actually follows the trail for quite a ways. you also get the added joy of biking through bog for part of the way.
but these petty stream crossings are not the real source of dadd gulch's charm. no, THAT comes from the vicious foliage and blood thirsty insect life that happily populate the trail area. due to infrequent use, the surrounding foliage comes right up to the trail and sometimes covers it. and these plants are angry.
but anyway, on with the story. john and i were riding with scott and mary. mary is a cow orker of john's, and scott is her husband. scott is probably the most fit person i've ever met. he's a volunteer fireman at rist canyon. scott would ride ahead, then stop and wait for the rest of us to catch up. a lot.
i don't remember how far we'd actually gone before the first time i had to get off and push, but i do remember it wasn't all that far. turns out getting off and pushing wasn't THAT terrible a thing to do, since it gave me an opportunity to pick the ticks off my sadly DEET-deficient socks. i deeted up after that, but it didn't seem to deter the ticks at all.
there are two kinds of hazards on dadd gulch trail that frequently occur, and cause you to have to leave the pedals. these are a) slippery, wet, sudden steep uphills and b) dry, sandy, sudden steep uphills with lots of loose rocks. the first part of the trail is dominated by the former, the latter become more prevalent the further you go.
the further up we got on the trail, the thicker the ground foliage became. soon the trail looked like it was somewhere in southeast asia, or the african jungle maybe, rather than in colorado. the trail, when completely visible was barely wide enough for a bike. this made it especially difficult when we were pushing.
at one point the trail opened up a bit, and grew wider. this, unfortunately, did not last. and when it closed back up again it was worse than before.
i managed to push or ride through some particularly noxious plant that first cut open the front of my left leg, and then, coated it with some sort of poison that caused me to break out in a rash. the rash quickly faded, but the open cut with poison in it continued to hurt. and hurt and hurt and hurt, a disproportionate amount of pain, considering it was such a tiny little cut. it's still tingling and throbbing as i write this. the funny thing was that john and mary kept telling me it was my right leg that looked bad and i had to keep telling them, "no, that's just DIRT. leamme alone."
once we got out of the jungle, the trail turned (more) uphell ... er, hill. yeah, that's it. lots of loose sand, loose rocks. we began a long curve around a mountain. i would like to note that the trail is VERY beautiful, as is most of colorado. but hey, it wasn't beautiful enough, baby.
i think it was just about this time that john confirmed my suspicion that, "this is no longer fun."
at the top of this section are some areas of clearcut forest. the clearcutting seems to have happened quite a while ago, and new trees are already coming up. and frankly, after coming through the Heart Of Darkness, the open space was kind of welcome.
boy, was i SPANKED. brutally, totally spanked. the trail, though easier at this point, was rapidly pushing me towards The Wall. and i really really didn't want to go there. we stopped frequently. mary is a slower rider even than i am, so i could stop even more frequently under the pretense of "waiting for her." chyeah, RIGHT. i was DYING.
at about this point we had to hop the remnants of an old barbed wire fence, into another clearcut area. we stopped for a power bar break, which actually helped a lot. shortly after this we hit a dirt road and the apparent end of the trail. we had a choice of going up or down. down looked good, so we went that way. we encountered two cars on this road. one of them told us we were going the right way.
from here it's all downhill REAL FAST. this dirt road intersected another dirt road where we also headed downhill. that hit Pingree Park road which took us back to the 14. we then had about a 4 mile road ride back to the trucks. it was uphill, but not too bad. worse than the gravity was the downstream wind. but after dadd gulch, it was a actually quite refreshing.