The Best for Last

The weather finally cleared, beautiful blue sky with a few wispy clouds around. The plan was to revisit a ride we did last time, a combo of a gravel road climb, Reno divide, and a few single tracks, Flag Creek, Bear Creek and Deadman’s gultch. There was also the potential for adding on an extra bonus 5 miles with some extra climbing near the end. This is another classic Crested Butte ride, right there with 401, just tougher to get to the trailhead and a tougher ride in general, but simply amazing. We started from the Deadman’s gultch trailhead with a temp of 49 degrees. The first five miles are a gravel road climb, starting at about 9600 feet and ending at 11200. It starts easy gaining only about 400 feet in the first couple miles then it gets steep but at least the road is in good shape so it’s a smooth grind. We ran into 4 guys from Georgia at the top before we headed down one of the most amazing sections of single track ever. It was a rather wide meadow to start then funneled into more of a creek canyon where beavers had dammed up the creek into a series of small ponds. We crossed flag creek and started up one of its tributaries. 2 and half miles later and some climbing we found ourselves on a gravel road. This seems to be where we screwed up last time but managed to make the right navigations this time heading up to Bear Creek trail. This is where things really became magic.

This started one of the best downhills howie and I have ever been on. It rolled through a mile or so of alpine meadow then started at a little steeper pitch but still a ton of fun. It opened up a bit again for the last bit of bench cut down to the intersection of Deadman’s Gultch trail 15 miles into the ride.

At this point the choice was either go right and up, with 5 miles back to the truck or head left and take 10 miles to get back. We were both feeling good and in love with the ride so we opted for the bonus miles and went left. We headed down the trail another mile along the creek until we hit Rosebud trail. There were a few hunters getting ready to head into the bush as some sort of bow hunting season started the next day. The trail was not a lot of fun, the motorcycles had really beat it up and it was very loose with lots of baby head and baby fist sized rocks everywhere. 2.75 miles and 1400 feet of vertical and a bunch of hike a bike later we were at Cement Mountain trail with promises of downhill rides through open alpine meadows with amazing views. For the most part it was true although there was also a few small climbs in there as well.

There was also a section that went through some dark forest that was still quite wet and didn’t seem to ever dry out very well, slippery and lots of puddles, not much fun. That was short lived and across more alpine meadow bench cut before intersecting with Deadman’s gultch trail with a couple hundred feet climb to the top before a 1000 foot vertical drop in 2 miles on switch back trails back to the truck. In hind sight, the miserable climb up Rosebud really was not worth the extra alpine views across Cement and we’ll just head up Deadman’s next time. Besides the rosebud climb, the only other detracting point of the route was the number of mud puddles in the trail from motorcycles.