Hlawaty - Mountain Biking Colorado: An Atlas of Colorados Greatest Off-Road Bicycle Rides

Mountain Biking Colorado

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Mountain Biking Colorado

An Atlas of Colorados Greatest Off-Road Bicycle Rides

Third Edition

Stephen Hlawaty

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Falcon and FalconGuides are registered trademarks and Make Adventure Your Story is a trademark of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2018 by Stephen Hlawaty

All photos are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Maps: Deanta Global Publishing The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hlawaty, Stephen author.

Title: Mountain biking Colorado : an atlas of Colorados greatest off-road bicycle rides / Stephen Hlawaty.

Description: Third Edition. | Guilford, Connecticut : FalconGuides, an imprint of Globe Pequot, [2018] | Series: A Falcon guide | Previous edition published: Guilford, Connecticut ; Helena, Montana : Falcon, 2003. | Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK--T.p. verso. | Includes index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009009 (print) | LCCN 2018009357 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493036868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493022496 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Mountain biking--Colorado--Guidebooks. | Bicycle trails--Colorado--Guidebooks. | Outdoor recreation--Colorado--Guidebooks. | Colorado--Guidebooks.

Classification: LCC GV1045.5.C6 (ebook) | LCC GV1045.5.C6 H55 2018 (print) | DDC 796.6309788--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009009

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

The author and The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. assume no liability for accidents happening to, or injuries sustained by, readers who engage in the activities described in this book.

Contents

Preface

Growing up in New York City, my friends and I took to the streets, the cemeteries, and the railroad tracks with our three- and five-speed Ross, Schwinn, and Huffy bicycles. Wed set up ramps of brick and plywood before trains of old metal garbage cans and clear as many of those rusted cars as we could. In hindsight, those cemeteries were anything but eternal resting places, and train tracks were nothing more than modified singletrack. One thing was certain; we had inherited the earth, albeit of stone and steel, and knew enough to enjoy what had been given to us.

That single truth remained steadfast throughout my years growing upthrough weekends camping as a Boy Scout in the cold rain and snow of the Middle Atlantic states; through timeless hours spent chopping wood for the clubhouse in Hawley, Pennsylvania; through many a star-filled night, staring aimlessly into campfires ablaze with the hope and understanding of my many years to come and of the few that had passed already. And as the flames of my childhood forged the frame of my life, my inheritance took shape and began to grow in the embers of my eyes.

Jeremy More and Amanda Hlawaty enjoy the rays and the blaze of a setting sun and rising fire atop the San Juan Mountains Last Dollar Pass.

It wasnt until moving to Colorado that I realized the sheer magnitude of this inheritance. Standing in awe before the Rocky Mountains, absorbed in the cool darkness of a 14,000-foot mountain shadow (one of fifty-eight identified by the Colorado Geological Survey), I welcomed Colorado as my new home. And Colorado, for its part, had welcomed me as its newest inheritor, offering me verdant forests larger than the entire state of Maine, 300 miles of Rocky Mountain highs, champagne powder, crashing rivers, lonesome deserts, sprawling grasslands, and the sweetest cantaloupes in the world. But whats always to be remembered is that this is a shared inheritance. And due courtesy should be given to those who have come before us.

As mountain bikers, we owe much to the original clunkers who in 1974 took their modified Schwinn Excelsiors to the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, and descended with news of the next great and future king in the way of outdoor recreation. Mountain biking had been born. But although mountain biking was born in California, its soul lives in Colorado. Thats not to say, however, that mountain biking is dead. Far from it. Mountain biking has only found itself a heaven on earth in which to lay its tracks.

And nowhere in Colorado do these tracks sink deeper than in the hallowed hills of Crested Butte. As local lore has it, after the summers forest fire season had ended, local firefighters would return from their mountain posts via their town bicycles, careening down mountain dirt roads at breakneck speeds. One such road led to the top of 12,705-foot Pearl Pass. In summer 1976, a crew of motorcyclists from Aspen roared over Pearl Pass and descended upon Crested Butte, commencing to boast about their achievement. Viewing the incident as a cultural invasion and a challenge to their bravado, the firefighters decided to do their Aspen neighbors one better. On a cold September morning, about fifteen of Crested Buttes finest smoke eaters began their climb of Pearl Pass to Aspen on their town bikes. The tour ended at Aspens Hotel Jerome, and Colorado mountain biking had been born. Interestingly, the same spirit that sparked the birth of mountain biking in Colorado also fueled the flames of the birth of the state.

Gold! Gold!! Gold!!! Gold!!!! Hard to Get and Heavy to Hold! read the headlines in 1858 when the valuable metal was discovered along the Platte River at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Within a year, 50,000 immigrants had forced settlers old and new to consider establishing an organized government on the Colorado frontier. Government of some kind we must have, hailed one new Coloradan, and the question narrows itself down to this point: Shall it be the government of the knife and the revolver, or shall we unite in forming here in our golden country... a new and independent state?