Two-Wheelin in the Mile High City

Tuesday I had myself a Bicycle tour of downtown Denver. And I’m convinced: it’s the best way to tour this town!

Cherry Creek cuts through the city in a wide canal with bike trails on both sides. It passes under steel-and-timber rail trestles where it smells like creosote and pigeon, over spillways where muskrats frolic, past banks of multicolored condos to the glamorously named Confluence Park, where it flows into (aka confluences with) the Platte River.

The Platte flows to the Missouri, which joins the Mississippi and eventually floods New Orleans… but here, it’s still a calm brownish-green stream.

Lovely manmade cascade, looks almost sort of natural!

Confluence Park is pretty artificial-looking: a big lawn, couple of bridges, bunch of sidewalks fencing the river in. But still, you can sit on the banks and watch the water go by. The sun shines bright and often on Denver, and you know I love sun on a river. Even in the middle of a weekday, the park was full of bright-faced pedestrians, young couples with their shoes off and feet in the water, cyclists zooming around like they had someplace to be…

Confluence Park is also where you’ll find the world’s largest REI store, which features a two-story indoor climbing wall, approximately 800 friendly polo-wearing salespeople, and a lovely old man who sits at a counter crowded with binders and pamphlets, giving you free directions and advice on how to reach all of Colorado’s state parks and what to do when you get there. There’s a Starbucks too, with a big outdoor patio where folks can sit and sip their ventis and watch each other sip ventis.

For those (like me) who can’t afford no REI or no Starbucks, the trail keeps going: on down the river, or up toward the stadium. There’s a big Six Flags park here too; the rollercoasters and waterslides echo the stadium’s rhythmic roofline. It all looks pretty beautiful, especially from a Google satellite:

I rode that way for a few minutes, then turned and headed back toward the skyscrapers, along through downtown.

Denver’s got a lot of old brick buildings left over from the gold-and-steel era, many of which still have ads painted on their brick walls. Many of the ads have windows cut right through the original letters.

You can find photos of the historic ads through HistoricDenver, but they’re missing my favorite mural, created by a local artist:

That mural is in Five Points, the “bad” part of town. That’s where I’m staying now, with Lynne. Compared to West Oakland, Five Points ain’t so bad: there are signs of poverty and crime, but still things are generally clean, and you can also see gentrification throughout the neighborhood. Like anything else, it’s a process (see photo, right). Denver seems to have a lot of that: places that are being transformed one way or another. Some more successfully than others.

Anyway.

One other exciting thing happened on Bike Tour Day: I met up with one Jeremy Royce, who filmed me for his New Era documentary series. He’s traveling too, finding and interviewing “people who are actively working to change the world around them for the better”. Like me! I’ll let you know when the film is up, in fact I’ll probably post it here.

The sun is out again, and Denver is improving day by day. So I’m off to have more adventures in volunteering: tomorrow I work for Habitat for Humanity!