This past weekend we road the Copper Triangle, an 80 mile organized ride from Copper Mountain to Leadville, to Minturn and back over Vail Pass to Copper. This event is in its third year to raise money for the Davis Phinney and travels over three mountain passes for an overall gain or around 6,000 feet. Though not as intense or long as the Triple Bypass I rode last month, this was another fun event, especially since Camille and I did it together.
This event has a rolling start and you can start as early as 5:30am or 8:00am, we chose the latter. The ride up Fremont Pass was a nice warm up with a great view of the mountains to the east, which we trekked along the top two weeks ago for our 24 hour adventure race. The first pass was reached pretty quickly and we made a short stop at the first aid station before rolling out toward Leadville. After reaching Leadville, we turned right onto Highway 24. We were prepared for a Paris-Roubaix, since the road had been torn up to be repaved. The Paris-Roubaix is a cycling race in France along cobblestone roads. While I thought that was an exaggeration on the part of the ride officials, it was well named!
The ride down Tennessee Pass took us along Camp Hale, the home of the 10th Mountain Division during World War II. After conquering Battle Mountain, we dropped back into Minturn, a small mountain town with a lot of character and packed with tourist that day.
We pulled in the Vail West aid station and ran into a couple of Camille’s friends who were riding a tandem. What an interesting experience! Adam and Kristina do a lot of the Colorado rides tandem and swore it was a actually a relationship builder.
Now we had a nice stretch before Vail Pass, the steepest and longest of the day. I was a little concerned about Camille getting worn out on the climb since she’d ridden strong all day. Wow, she never ceases to amaze me! I rode ahead a bit and came back to find her passing people on the arduous climb right before the brutal 15% grade where people were bailing and pushing their bikes up. Camille totally conquered the grade and we enjoyed the rest of the climb up and drop back into Copper.
After a night of taking it easy in Copper Village and enjoying a low key pizza, we called it an early night since there was mountain biking on the agenda for Sunday. We started Sunday with breakfast at the Butterhorn in Frisco before taking off on a quick ride. Yeah, ok, we had the same jersey on since it was a ride jersey and longest sleeves we had with us for the slight chill. It was nice to stretch out a bit before heading back down to Denver for another week. Next race stop, the Denver Oyster.
