Crested Butte!

Tue July 24th:

Drove from Denver out to Crested Butte (someone at a bike shop in Maine told me that the mountain biking in Crested Butte was awesome, so I figured I’d check it out). It took me a lot longer to get there than I anticipated…in fact I rolled into town about 9:30pm (not the best conditions to go out and find a camp site and set up the tent). I drove around in the national forest for a while near town (in a national forest, you can camp anywhere for free, but in this one it was really tough to find flat ground that wasn't either all overgrown or had cars there already). Anyhow, I ended up finding a rustic camp ground called Cement Creek about 5 miles south of town.

Crested Butte is a bit tough to get to – coming from 70 (the major highway that a lot of the ski resorts like Vail are on), you have to take a single lane road south for about an hour, and then the actual road (Kebler pass) over to Crested Butte is all dirt and over the tops of mountains for about 20 miles (and it’s a slow 20 miles!). It was a heck of a haul, especially once the sun went down.

Oh yeah, I really like the town so far. People here are really into their activities (or so it seems). I ate pizza on the main street, and even in the pitch dark at like 10:30 tons of people were riding bikes all over the place. I felt at home right away – some dude was having a birthday party at the pizza place and when I walked by to go to the bathroom he grabbed my hand and shook it and patted me on the back (either he was bombed and forgot that I wasn’t invited to the party, or he was pretty laid back), and then every time the waitress came over to ask me a question like what kind of beer do you want, etc., she’d respond “sweet” to my every response (just like me!)

Ok, enough for now. Later.

Wed July 25th: (this is a double post - unlike other places along the way, it's much more difficult to get access to the Internet, camp, etc!!)

I packed up the tent at the Cement Creek campground (figured out the rationale for the name – every camp site where you pitch your tent is on a gravel bed!) and headed into downtown Crested Butte. I chatted with people in the bike store about appropriate rides for a newbie to the area, and ended up choosing the Snodgrass trail. The trail head was outside of town, but I was so confident in my abilities that I decided to get the extra exercise and bike there. First mistake – it was all up hill and it took a good 45 mins or so. I was super hot and soaked before I even got to start the ride! The people at the bike store basically said you’ll have to climb a little at the beginning of the trail and then the rest is down hill, so by the time you get back to town you’ll feel great. I guess NJ “a little” is different than Crested Butte “a little”…I climbed for a good couple of hours straight. The elevation was definitely impacting me too (the trail head was well over 8,000 to begin with) – I had to stop quite frequently (sometimes every 50 yards or so in the steep up hill single track sections) and keel over to catch my breath. When I got to the top, a had time to snap a quick photo (the one of me in pain below) before getting the heck off the mountain, as another thunderstorm was rolling in. At least this time I had 2 spare tubes, all the tools to deal with anything, and water/food…a step in the right direction!

Here’s a sweet little story for you – after I got back to town I decided to drive back to the Cement Creek camp site and grab a spot before it was pitch black. The camp host was telling all about their bear encounters (glad I didn’t know about that last night), and showed me a cooler with all kinds of teeth marks in it. Anyways (that’s not the real story), after I set up the tent again I went back into Crested Butte and found an awesome hostile where I could take a shower for $5 and there was an attached laundromat!! It was so much better than the hostile that Habs and I stayed at in London (the one we stayed in by London bridge had bugs coming out of the shower drain, it was 100 degrees in the room, and when we walked around outside people threw eggs at us). Ok, enough of that.

Tomorrow I might hit another ride (the "401" trail is supposedly more difficult than the one today known as a “can’t miss”), and will definitely hit the disc golf course that’s right in town!

Pics:

The drive from Denver west into the Rockies was tough on the Honda...I topped out at around 50mph for much of it. I don't know if the other folks on the road took too well to that! Oh yeah, you can see little greenie in the pic too. He's been great company on the trip ;)


Nice little lake on the way out...at this point, I was still taking my time and stopping here and there to take pics. I thought for sure I'd be in Crested Butte within a couple of hours....didn't happen!


I wonder if it was raining under that little cloud...


Lots of Aspen trees up in Gunnison National Forest


Like I said, I grossly underestimated how long it would take me to get to Crested Butte. I was still way up on Kebler pass when it started to get dark. Good picture opps = cool, snaking your way down the mountain on the dirt road in the dark = uncool.


This is a pic from the Snograss trail, about 2/3 of the way up. That town you see at the base of the mountain is the ski town of Crested Butte. You can't see the downtown of Crested Butte - it's to the right and further down in the valley. For some strange reason I thought it would be a cake walk ride...


At the top of Snodgrass...see storm rolling in!


Me...dying...


Nice singletrack on the way down...