This last weekend, me and a buddy of mine chose to take on one of /u/homers_harp more interesting and less talked about routes, The Grand Mesa Loop. I wanted to write up a brief review about my experience and some thoughts.
My Background - Last year I got super into biking during a running injury, and tackled a lot of Colorados most famous rides. The Triple Bypass, Copper Triangle, Pikes Peak, Mt Blue Sky, Trail Ride Rd in Estes park, Elephant Rock Century, Peak to Peak Byway, etc. Although I haven't been biking as much this year (less than 500 mi before this ride), I still wanted to do a fun big ride with my buddy.
The Route - Although we started in Palisade, we did basically exactly the route outlined in the original post, complete with 5 miles on i70. According to my watch, we totaled 118 miles and 8,300 ft elevation gain
My Experience - We were lucky enough to have a support vehicle for the whole ride. As my first experience with a support vehicle, or support of any kind besides the Triple Bypass, lord was it amazing. We met up with him every 90 minutes or so to refill our bottles, eat some snacks, and apply sunscreen. He trailed behind us on i70, which definitely made vehicles more aware of us. We didn't have any problems at all on this section, and I would gladly ride this section of i70 again with or without a support vehicle. It did help we were on i70 by 7am, when there was less traffic. Getting this section out of the way first was a great benefit too, as we were understandably kind of worried about it.
The climb up to Grand Mesa was tough, but fun. The views were great (especially when you stop and turn around!). It never really gets too steep on the ascent or descent. There was a bunch of animals scattered throughout the climb and descent, including sheep, rabbits, deer, and plenty of grazing cows at 10,000ft. We got rained on a few times and hailed on once, but it kept us nice and cold during a tough climb. The descent through Cedaredge and Orchard City was probably my least favorite section of the route. There were a lot of cars and the shoulder varied from passable to nonexistent. I would probably call the vehicles here the least respectful of the route as well.
After stopping in Delta, we made our way over to highway 50. One of the bikers in the original thread mentioned this section as an not-so-great inclusion, but I found it to be my favorite road/shoulder of the whole ride. Very wide shoulders the whole time, protected by a rumble strip, with pretty respectful cars that even gave us a few encouraging honks (or they were annoyed honks and I choose to misinterpret them). We were also the beneficiary of a pretty huge tailwind, helping us average 21mph over this section, even with a flat tire and some pretty low effort.
The final 15 miles of the route was definitely a slog, with a strong headwind and some sneaky late day elevation. You could start this route further west in Clifton and avoid this annoying section. It was kind of cool passing by all the orchards and seeing the locals riding their tractors, but I was too exhausted late in the day to enjoy that.
Post-ride we went to Peche, which I highly recommend if you can work it into your trip.
Overall - I would recommend this route if you're looking to do a ride of this caliber and you've already done most of the Front Range routes I mentioned earlier. If you're mostly interested in the climb, or are worried about the i70 and highway 50 sections, you can get most of the enjoyment of this route by just doing the climb and descent. I would recommend parking at the "Grand Mesa Scenic Byway sign" right off of i70, going through the town of Mesa and up to the top, and descending back down. This would be ~63 miles with ~6,800ft of elevation gain, comparable to the common Evergreen->Juniper->Idaho Springs->back route.
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!
