What is everyone raving
about? How come every Mountain Bike Joe
off the street tells me that I have to go to this place? It’s talked about as if it is some kind of
God. When people say the words Crested
Butte, they bow their heads and point their fingers to the sky. Personally, I’m more interested in what’s on
the ground, in front of me. But I had to
take everyone’s advice, good or bad, and check out the place for myself.
If Crested Butte were a
divine figure, it would be a beautiful goddess, tender, warm, and
inviting. Then she would make you work
like a slave to reap the rewards of her palace in the sky. In all honesty, CB could be considered as “in
the sky” from any flatlanders vantage point.
It is surrounded virtually on all sides by 14ers. The riding is mostly done in the 9-11k feet
range. I’m from Indiana. This might hurt.
I went there to race in the
Mountain States Cup Fat Tire 40 event.
Well, I should say that I went there to race in an XC race, of which I
had failed to look up the specifics to until late Thursday night, for the race
on Saturday morning. Before getting to
CB, I made a one-day pit-stop in Breckinridge to pre-ride one of the loops of
the Breck68. Until this time I had been
doing most of my riding on the Front Range, but I knew that I loved the
high-alpine stuff way more. That day in
Breckinridge turned out to be a breath of fresh breathless air. (The term “air” will be used loosely, to describe
the oxygen-deficient gaseous mixture that enters your lungs to no avail or
reward. It’s kind of like eating
dirt. Sure, you can digest it, but it
will only fool your body into thinking it is being satisfied. Or, if you don’t like dirt, and you’re like
me, I might compare it to drinking beer when stark-raving hungry and deficient
of all nutrients, body on the verge of shutdown, say, after a long bike race,
instead of eating real food. Okay, that’s
a bad comparison, because beer makes you feel good, and air at 11k feet doesn’t.) I had been craving mountain singletrack like
this for a long time. Long, fast,
flowing sections of prime dirt under your tires, thick green odorous pines
whizzing by your head, and cool air; and endless miles of such. It was a great day of riding, and had me
amped to continue on to an even cooler place.
It wasn’t until Thursday night that I looked up the MSC race, and
realized that it was called the Fat Tire 40 (hmm…what does 40 stand for?), that
it was twice as long as a regular XC race, and involved 7500 feet of
climbing. Umm.. wait a second. What?
7500 hun…dred..what? Okay, no
biggie though, right. I mean, I was
preparing for the Breck 68, which involved over 9k of ascent, but, uhh, in 68
miles. So putting my four years of
engineering classes and subsequent degree to work, I did a very complicated
calculation to compare the vertical ascent per mile of each race. Breckinridge 68: 132 feet/mile; Fat Tire 40:
187 feet/mile. This could get
interesting.
Race Day:
The race started out with a
neutral roll-out from the ski resort base controlled by a pace car. This was a great idea, IF you had multiple
gears and could keep up with said pace car.
By the time it peeled off we were close to funneling into some tight singletrack,
and I watched about 40 others hit the trail before me. As is normally the case, the first 20 minutes
were all climbing, traversing our way up the ski area, on singletrack way too
tight for passing. Luckily, I managed to
get in right behind the first-place singlespeeder, and we worked our way up
together, constantly in traffic. At some
point near the top of this first climb I decided to push and got around him and
a bunch of others. Then we came out onto
a service road, which split in two directions in front of us, with a single
track trail dipping back into the forest.
3 options, and no signs. I
followed a couple of riders who went straight down one of the service roads,
instead of breaking off back into the singletrack. This was wrong. By the time we turned around and got back to
the trail we had lost 3-4 minutes. No
worries, it was going to be a long day.
But it is frustrating that race officials failed to mark this spot. Nonetheless, the next 20 minutes or so was
all downhill, on the trails of the ski area.
Super fast, rough, rocky, with constant switchbacks. It was all I (and my bike) could do to hang
on. We hit some more fun, but rocky and
technical singletrack before the first huge climb up a dirt road. The climb took 30 minutes or more to
complete, and seemed to never end.
Although it hurt, it was satisfying as I was picking off riders by the
tens. After that point my recollection
of the race is very foggy. It hurt, and
then it hurt again. Then it was amazing
and beautiful and out-of-this-world wild-flower carving smooth and
buttery. Then it hurt again. Leading into one of the longest and hardest
climbs I have probably ever done, I passed the front-running singlespeeder who
was stopped to fix something on his bike.
He had passed me when I took the wrong turn earlier in the race. At this point my legs were already
half-smoked. The climb started with
loose gravely dirt road that wound its way up the mountainside, continuing to
get steeper and steeper the further up you got.
It was all I could do to slowly torque my pedals over the top of each
stroke, gasping for air where there is none.
Then, once hitting singletrack, it got worse. There were more than a few sections so steep
that my one gear was defeated, and I was off and hiking, along with just about
everyone else. It was frustrating and
exhausting at this juncture in the race.
Again, I don’t remember much after that.
Only that I was tired and unsure of the distance covered. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have
my GPS. I finished in 4 hours, almost on
the dot, taking 1st place in the Single Speed Open class. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep pace with
some of the front-runners in the geared department. The race was too long with some very fast
singletrack sections and long stretches of dirt road where the geared guys were
able to push forward, with all their technology and fancy equipment.
In hindsight, it was an
amazing course put together by the organizers.
One 40-mile loop, taking you far out into the back-country of CB,
encompassing some of the best it has to offer, as well as the ski resort
trails, and back-country double track and fire roads. This is the one event on the MSC calendar
that I would definitely do again. If
nothing else it gets you out to CB, wherein you can spend days enjoying some of
the best mountain biking on the planet.
 |
| Trail 401. Just right up that mountain. |
And that is just what I
did. I went out the next day, mightily
hung-over and sleep-deprived from a night of partying with friends in Crested
Butte. Lesson 1: Drinking after a hard
race is the worst thing for your body, and it will let you know. I have learned this lesson many times. Lesson 2:
Force yourself to go ride, work off some of those beers from the night
before, fool your body into thinking it feels good as the remnants of alcohol
sweat from your pores, and have one of the best rides of your life partly
because of the semi-delirious state you are in.
I struggle to learn this lesson, as I usually succumb to the vices of bed
and greasy food. At any rate, I headed
out for one of the most incredible rides I had ever done; the storied Trail401. Starting from Mt. Crested Butte, it’s
about an hour or more climb up a dirt road, probably ascending 3k feet or more,
before getting to Schofield Pass, at which point you climb the rest of the way
on beautiful singletrack. The descent is
pure mountain biking excellence through fields of wildflowers traversing a
mountainside, aspen groves and pure flow.
Nuff said.
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