After a day off in Dillon yesterday, which was spent relaxing and doing some shopping at a Pearl Izumi outlet, we took on Hoosier Pass today. The whole day was about this effort as the following profile.
Many of us were worried about the elevation (11,593’) after struggling in a much lower location in Dillon. I could not carry on a conversation while walking up hill there yesterday, so the idea of pedaling for miles even higher seemed challenging at best and impossible at worst. We talked about altitude sickness and what to watch for before we started out this morning. Many of us talked about not sleeping well last night with anxiety over this climb.
But before we got to the climb, we rode on a beautiful bike path around Dillon Reservoir, past Frisco and to Breckenridge. The town of Breckenridge was hopping on an early Sunday morning! The film festival was quite evident and there were long lines at many store fronts along Main St.
Beautiful Dillon Reservoir
The climb to Hoosier Pass itself started out easy. A percent here, another there. There was a surprising amount of traffic on an early Sunday morning, and with narrow shoulders the focus was on staying safe as we headed up. However, drivers were, for the most part, courteous and gave us space.
After a few short 5-6% stretches something appeared ahead of us. At first I thought it was a driveway, but as we got closer, it became clear it was a challenging switchback, the first of many! My strategy was to go slowly and take breaks as needed. A few miles later, the pass appeared!
Taken during a break along the climb
Here you can see the 11,539’ in elevation
And here is the celebration!
Of course, on the other side of the summit is the descent. I have done a lot of work on my technique for descents and also my mental ability to descend, but I was still more anxious about going down than climbing up. The stakes are much higher going down (at least they are in my head): when climbing perhaps I could tip over from lack of momentum, but on the descent there is speed, there are drop-offs without guardrails, there is wind and cold temps. There seem to be an essentially unlimited number of bad things that can happen coming down from a pass. Conquering the fear of all those things remains a goal. I make progress, yet still fear persists!
When we reached the flatter portion of the end of the ride, a group of us stopped for some food in Alta. Both Alta and Fairplay, CO, our destination today, lay claim to the South Park TV series, and the place we stopped clearly played that up.
The rest of the trip will involve substantially less climbing and often longer distances. With this behind us, the end of the tour comes into vision, but hopefully we still have lots of great riding ahead! Onward!
Riding to the summit. Photo credit Marilyn Hutchinson.