Did you know that there are 13 lakes in central Lakewood? Yes, and you can tour them by bicycle to take my Lakewood Central Lakes Tour.
Here I have numbered the lakes (click to enlarge):
One way to do the tour is to choose a route which climbs to the highest-altitude lake early on, then gradually descend to lower lakes. This way you don’t have to go uphill so much at the end. Because of the hills and valleys, you can’t actually coast all the way from the highest lake to the lowest lake, but the route is relatively flat except for the first part. Even that’s not strenuous, certainly nothing like Green Mountain to the west. You won’t need a mountain bike for this tour, because it’s all paved with the exception of a few optional sections around a few of the lakes that you can easily ride on a balloon-tire cruiser bike. Road bikes with skinny high-pressure tires will probably want to stick to the pavement.
Here’s my route (click to enlarge):
I like to start at the Addenbrooke Park Pond, not because it’s the highest lake, but because the surrounding park has plenty of parking and it’s a beautiful place to start and end the tour. It’s also positioned so that if you get tired, you can skip the 3 lakes in Belmar Park and head straight back to Addenbrooke Park. The route has sections that loop out to pick up lakes, and you can skip these loops for a shorter tour. The full route is almost exactly 11 miles.
The Main Reservoir is the highest lake, so there is a short climb up to it. It’s all downhill from there (almost). In general, going east is downhill, so Kendrick Lake is lower than Smith Reservoir, and Kountze Lake is lower than Addenbrooke Park Pond.
Lake #6 is Carmody Park Pond. Next to the park is the Carmody Recreation Center, and an early evening ride revealed an interesting feature not obvious during the day. Here’s a night shot of the Mondriaanesque east window (click to enlarge):
Vell done, round up all bike pics and start a bike blog with a bell that rings when you click, brakes that squeel, hmmmmm, okay, now my sinapses are firing, how about a pic of your cruise bike, with parts that are links to sound files? Or pics of scenes along the trail, when clicked they link to sound files of that scene, like the water spurting out of the Standley Lake overflow.
Latuh dood!
P.
Yep, time to take the camera along and show the lakes from the route. Today there was a little gurgling sound from the irrigation ditch next to Green Gables Park Pond. I could record that, too. By the way, Google Maps’ terrain view doesn’t have the irrigation ditches marked anymore, so I don’t know which ditch is which!