As soon as the morning warmed up to nine degrees at nine o'clock, I took off from Avon for a nine hour ride high in the Colorado Rockies. The weather had cleared just long enough yesterday to get in a very early-season loop around one of cycling's greatest set of mountain passes, climbing over Vail Pass, Fremont Pass and Tennessee Pass.
My derailleur had taken a knocking in the case on the trip from Canada and needed adjustment, so I pulled into Vail Bike Tech, where a mechanic named "Tooth" stopped it from skipping gears and popping out of my 27-tooth cog in the back (a very necessary gear during 1000 meter climbs.)
The owner of Vail Bike Tech said that the bike path from Vail to Copper Mountain had been plowed, all but several short sections. This is a shot of the trail, which is the old Highway 70 that runs parallel to the Interstate and is now closed to cars. This is the same stretch of road that I raced on in 1986, doing an uphill time trial as part of the local bike club's summer racing series. It is also the place where I fell later that summer, doing about 75 kph down the hill and ending my cycling and triathlon season. This is one of the greatest bike paths in the world and today it was empty, but for good reason as I would discover as I climbed further along the trail. Mid-May is just too early in the year to plan a trip up into the Rockies for cycling. Last year I was here three weeks later and those three weeks make all the difference.
The trail started in Avon just east of my hotel at 2282 meters and topped out on Vail Pass at 3235 meters. However, some of the portions of the path were pretty precarious. Luckily, I'd packed a small toolkit that included a sharp metal file that I used to clean the ice out of my cleats following the cycle-cross traverses of the snow and ice sections. Just past the pass, where the path usually goes in a tunnel under the Interstate, I had to carry my bike up a snowy cliff and cross the freeway to pick up the trail again on the other side. Why the State of Colorado had plowed more than thirty miles of the bike path and then left these sections was beyond me, but it sure made for an exciting trip.
In hindsight, I should have stopped in Copper Mountain to have some lunch, refill my water bottles and take a break. There were no services for the 35 km from there to Leadville and the climb from 2965 to the top of Fremont Pass at 3447 meters was really tough, riding into a 40 kph headwind. A couple of times I stopped to rest and felt light-headed, which isn't all that unexpected after four hours of climbing at that altitude. By the time I got to Leadville in the late afternoon the weather had turned threatening and there was snow falling in the distance and the temperature had dropped down to about 5 degrees. At a gas station outside of Leadville I filled my water bottles, had some coffee, candy bars and a Red Bull and felt marginally better. However, given the late hour, the deteriorating conditions and my tired legs, I pulled to the side of the road outside of town and hitched a ride part of the way towards Minturn. A cyclist who worked for the Department of Transportation picked me up and I threw my bike in the back of the pickup truck. He dropped me about 20 km down the road, from where I rode the final 35 km to Avon, mostly downhill.
Today is an enforced day off the bike since that threatening weather yesterday afternoon turned into a spring storm, dropping a covering of snow over the entire region overnight. Hopefully, the blue skies and warming weather later today will melt the snow and tomorrow morning I'll get in a ride before flying off to San Francisco in the late afternoon. In the meantime, I'm going to hang out in Avon, feeding a caloric deficit from yesterday (3978 calories burned in the climbs) and put my feet up in front of the fireplace.
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