"I'd rather stop, get off my bike, and eat a piece of fried
chicken," he says.
Since Don is in charge, we do precisely that, spreading a
red-and-white-checked tablecloth and picnic lunch across the ground
one afternoon. We also snarf double-chunk cookies and hunks of
chocolate. There are plenty of healthy eats, too; enormous green
salads at dinner and blueberry walnut pancakes for breakfast. In
fact, there is plenty of everything to eat, all of it prepared by
Richard Brown, a professional chef who also happens to ride a
mountain bike as if he were born on it.
You can bike between the 10th Mountain Division Huts on your own
(hut reservations are required), but sans guide you have to bring
your own
food, cooking on the huts' wood-burning stoves and using
the ample kitchen utensils provided. Paragon's $1,660 price tag for
the five-day Holy Cross Wilderness trip might seem steep until you
arrive wobbly-legged at the hut and someone else is splitting
kindling and preparing a gourmet meal in the fast-chilling
night.
More importantly, guides, by definition, know where to go and what
to do. Don and Richard point us down hidden single-track trails,
where the experienced riders in our group fly over the devilishly
rutted, rock-strewn trail as if it were Zambonied ice, and I make
my deliberate, teeth-clacking way via liberal application of the
brakes. They know places to fly-fish, and happy streams where we
dip our faces into cold, clear rejuvenating water and then lie back
on sun-warmed rocks. In the evenings, we take hikes through the
darkening woods, the undersides of circling hawks catching the last
of the gloaming light. On warm nights we sleep out under the stars,
persuaded by Don's irrefutable logic.
"We don't sleep out enough and we don't dance enough," he
professes.