Day 38 – Kremmling, Colorado to Breckenridge, Colorado

On the Road to Hoosier Pass

Saturday was supposed to be a 54 mile day into Breckenridge, with an elevation change of several thousand feet leading up to the final part of the climb to Hoosier Pass. I had looked at the weather report and since it called for no rain and light winds I wasn’t in too much of a hurry to get started.

I’ve noticed on the trip that some, maybe 20%, of the motorcyclists  will wave as they drive by.  If they are a Harley rider and look like one, forget it.  I don’t think any of them ever have. They just look straight ahead. Some of the motorcycles are so quiet and I can see the appeal of riding one of those, but some are incredibly loud and I can’t understand listening to that for hours and hours as you ride.

As I progressed and got to mile 21 there was a sign that said “Accident Ahead.”  A few miles further there was a sign directing you to leave the main road and take a right as a detour.  A guy was sitting in a truck and I asked him about the situation. He said they were still clearing up the accident area.  The detour was 11 miles, it would go around the lake and bring you right back to the main road. My immediate thought was that a 54 mile day had now become a 65 mile day.

As I was cycling around the lake and noticing how scenic it was, I then realized that this was part of the actual route and I was supposed to have turned on this road anyway.  All it did anyway was bring you to the other side of the narrow lake, followed parallel to highway 9 and then brought you back on to it. So it wasn’t a detour at all.

It was nice for a change to ride without hearing the sound of the wind at all and not worrying about it.  By the time I got to the town of Silverthorne at mile 39, a bike path began which eventually leads you into Breckenridge so there was no more traffic to deal with.

I passed through the town of Frisco, which is totally done up for tourists with the outdoor malls having the usual Gap and Tommy Hilfiger stores and all the rest. It was a bit of a shock seeing this type of civilization after all the little towns such as Mitchell, Oregon and Wisdom, Montana  I’ve passed through.  I didn’t like it at first but when I got to a main road in town they had a street festival going on with art and live music.  It was good to hang around there for a while and check things out.

I finally arrived in the ski town of Breckenridge around 6:00, somehow doing 61 miles when it was supposed to be 54.  There’s no camping around so I stayed in a bunk room at the Fireside Inn, run by Nikki and Andy, two nice people from England.  It’s a comfortable little place.  They said that haven’t seen cyclists heading east on the Trans Am in a while and that I’ll probably be the last of the season.

After arriving I got a message from my friend Donald.  I used to work with him and his wife in Myanmar and Nigeria.  He lives in Pueblo, about 150 miles away and was supposed to ride with me for a few days back into Pueblo, which coincidentally the route goes through. I didn’t expect him to join me in Breckenridge but I got a text saying he was on his way, which was good news.

The only problem was that all the rooms in Breckenridge were booked. To make a long story short, Donald set up his tent on the side of the road on the other side of the top of Hoosier Pass, spent the night and is cycling over the pass and down to Breckenridge this morning, where he’ll turn around and bike the 12 difficult miles  back to the top of the pass. I think I would have just waited for me at the top.

Once this pass is out of the way it will be going from over 11,000 feet down to around 5,000 at Pueblo and then the turn east for the second half of the trip.