Crested Butte

Friday 15th

Drove up over Cottonwood Pass – the highest the van has been so far on this trip, an altitude of over 12000 feet. And then all the way down the other side to Crested Butte, one of Colorado’s many mountain bike towns.

Introduced J&H to The Great American Breakfast at Paradise Café, then headed on up into the hills through Mount Crested Butte, to find somewhere to spend the night. Found a wild National Forest site, perched on the side of Gothic Mountain, along a bumpy dirt track. I’d spotted that the local ski centre was doing free chairlift rides in the evening, so we all had a few hours riding the downhill trails of the bike park. Thunderstorms around the local hills meant that the usual free-Friday night crowds weren’t around, and it wasn’t too hot. My bike is still just about holding together, it’s pretty old and tired now. No idea what I’m going to do with it when we go through the next phase of selling / giving things away in September, to thin possessions down for our trip south. I managed to get two pinch punctures during the evening, broke a tube valve, and a pump. Awesome riding though – typical bike park trails – a range of smooth swoopy berms and rougher technical bumpy stuff through aspen groves.

Saturday 16th

We’d come up this valley to be near a trail called the “401” – one of Colorado’s ten best mountain bike rides. We took the van a short way further up the road and parked up. The ride starts with a couple of miles of tough climbing – a bit of dirt road and then singletrack to the high point at about 11000 feet. Pretty hard work riding at this altitude, but incredible scenery. Then perhaps 6 miles of downhill, skimming along the side of the valley, looking out over amazing views, swooping and twisting through chest-high wild flowers. They say that the height of the wild flowers is a prediction for the depth of snow that’s going to settle in the coming winter. Left Rose and Helen at the bottom of the trail while we rode back up the road to get the van.

There’s a load more riding here, but we need to keep moving. It’s the same story with everywhere we’ve been – it would be easy to spend days, even weeks, getting to know a place and meeting people, but with limited time, we’re choosing to just get a taster of each spot. So we headed on south through Gunnison towards Salida – over the top of Monarch pass then found a campsite nearby. I was just starting my shower out of the back of van when the rain clouds opened – Jon and Rose put the awning up. The rain didn’t last long, and by the end of the evening we were sat around the camp fire, burning the cardboard bike boxes that we’d been lugging around ever since J&H arrived.