It started raining on the ride home, which I expected and was prepared for...but then the skies opened up in a big way.

I had my backpack and phone covered and my rain cape/poncho at the ready. I had decided to take the shortest route home (5.8 miles) which goes through Colorado College. A mile into my ride I stopped and donned my rain cape as the light drizzle welled into rain. I knew a couple of good covered spaces at the college in case the rain grew into a storm. But at the Mesa Road bridge over fountain Creek there was police tape at both ends including the sidewalk and police cars with their lights on, so I hopped on the Greenway trail. A few hundred yards ahead the trail ducks under Uintah Street. I usually take advantage of the dip and fly under at 25mph, but in the few hundred yards the wind kicked up something fierce and the rain was the heaviest I've biked through in a long time.

There were already a couple of homeless people with their bike trailers and belongings on the generous shoulder under the bridge. The creek was full and racing and roaring louder than I can remember. Then a runner came through, drenched, but not stopping. Then a cyclist in lycra on a fenderless, double-sprung mountain bike with knobbies came blazing down towards us and hit the brakes which squealed and bellowed like an old furniture truck. I saw a couple of more cyclists stop underneath across the creek on the side that's not paved. Then a couple of more double-sprung cyclists in race gear stopped and joined the first one. I saw now they had name placards pinned to their jerseys and one said coach. Then another race clad off-roader shot through the underpass like the Amtrak express through Princeton Junction.

The surprisingly cold wind kicked into overdrive rocking my bike and pressing insistently against my rain poncho. Looking out from under the bridge the rain was coming down in sheets...and then relented. The name-tagged mountain bikers took off into the still considerable rain. One towards where they were headed, two back from where they came. I started off back home, the rain cape keeping me dry, but the rain was quickly dissipating.

There were quite a few places with standing water. On my other routes I could anticipate most of these, but why were all of these flooded areas a surprise? I just realized this morning it's because this portion of the trail has only been paved less than a year, and in the past, if rain was possible I avoided the trail.

The long fenders let me glide through the 'water hazards' and the cape kept me dry until a couple of miles from home when it was no longer needed. Three blocks from the house there were more police lights, and the final long downhill street was closed off. I took the sidewalk. A few of the homes have tall bushes and shrubs that intrude over the edges of the pavement...I felt like a car going through the vertical rollers in a car wash. At the bottom of the hill by the grade school an SUV was being loaded onto a flatbed...the SUV looked as if it had rolled and people were standing around looking upset.

I turned and pedaled up our street to complete my ride home.