Kremmling to Leadville

June 27.

Leadville, elevation 10,000 ft, is the highest incorporated city in the United States, and that is where we were scheduled to stay the night.  But first we had to get there!  We got to ride through Silverthorne, where our interns had picked up the starter the night before.

We started out riding along a road that looked like walls of coal on both sides toward the mountains.  One of the main highlights of the day for me was a bike path through Silverthorne that ran alongside the Blue River.  It was truly delightful!  But after going along the river, we had to climb up the side of a huge dam!  That was the highlight of my trip so far, I believe.  The bicycle path had a little sign on it to indicate that it was steep, and you could see all the switchbacks.  We were also already at 9000 ft of elevation!  And I made it all the way up the path to the top of the dam.

After reaching the top, the wind hit me.  But I kept going because the rest stop was still about two miles away.  When I got to the rest stop, I stood there for a second and then exclaimed, “I am seriously amazing!”  Shortly after that I started to cry because I was so proud of myself.  People kept asking, “Are those happy tears, Ruth?”  I could only nod my head, I couldn’t speak.  I could not have done that climb three weeks early when we started that trip, especially at altitude.

Since we had a lot of climbing that day and a lot of altitude gain, we had the option of skipping a portion of the ride by shuttling ahead.  So I was planning to shuttle ahead to rest stop 3 and continue the ride from there.  Arriving at rest stop 3, it was very windy, and another person told me that the cross winds and head winds were terrible.  So I decided to stay in the van for the ride into Leadville.  We crossed over Fremont Pass at 11,000 ft, but Grace wasn’t willing to let us take our bikes off the rack to fake pictures!  We arrived at the First Baptist Church at Leadville and some of us went to get delicious hamburgers.

A couple of people got altitude sickness on the way into Leadville.  So that was a difficult day, even though very beautiful.