Bogus Basin officially closed on Saturday and that means that the 16-mile road up to the lodge (17 if you go all the way to Pioneer Condos) is now devoid of skier and snowboarder traffic. This is a great road that climbs 3,500 feet above Boise and doesn’t get much traffic when the resort is closed. So all the local cyclists head over there to do their hill work, which is what I did today. I headed straight out on Hill Road at a tempo pace then just rode high tempo up to Corrals and the cattle-guard hill. My goal was to do a couple 30-minute LT intervals and I wanted it to be pure climbing, which meant starting at the bottom of the switchbacks.

The first one was good, but my legs were feeling it the last 10 minutes. Even though yesterday’s ride was short, it left an impact on my legs! As I was climbing, it got colder and I wasn’t looking forward to the descent. That’s the main problem with climbing Bogus during spring or fall—you work up a sweat on the climb, but even if you bring extra clothes, you still freeze on the descent! 30 minutes of LT got me to just before the 5,000 ft. sign. I stopped to put on my skull cap and zip up my vest, then headed down. The few times I could push the pedals on the descent my legs felt weak. So I bagged the idea of doing a repeat of the first interval. Instead I decided to include an interval on my ride home.

I went home on Cartwright Road and I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain a steady wattage because of all the ups and downs. So I tried pushing the hills above threshold, then didn’t worry too much about the descents. I worked all the hills and flats and ended the interval at the top of Seaman’s Gulch Road out of Hidden Springs. It was almost 38 minutes with an average wattage of 268. A lot lower than my first interval, but due to the erratic nature of that route, I don’t think average power tells the whole story. So since the effort was greater than 20-minutes, I can use normalized power (NP) to summarize, and it was a more reasonable 283 watts. After the interval, I rode tempo to Floating Feather, followed by some easy spinning to my house.