Cycling Colorado’s Copper Triangle
Words by Sam Eldredge
“I live in the flat, and wait for the downhills.”
That’s what Luke admitted to me nine miles in and 1,800 feet up toward Fremont Pass. I almost had to pull my bike over in the tidal wave of shame that I felt in relating. It didn’t help that we weren’t yet to the top of just one of our three passes for the day, and that we had another 71 miles and 4,242 feet of climbing to ride.
The Copper Triangle is a route that weaves and climbs its way through the Colorado Rockies, from the Copper ski resort up and over Fremont Pass to Leadville, then over Tennessee Pass and Battle Mountain to Minturn, and finally skirting Vail and the 18-wheelers blasting along I-70 to the top of Vail Pass, ultimately, like any good triangular shape, back to the dirt parking lots of Copper. It’s beautiful, sometimes terrifying, certainly punishing on the underprepared, and our chosen way to spend the day.
In a “normal” year there would be a bike race on this course with thousands of cyclists climbing through the mountains. There would have been an entry fee, but with that would have come aid stations for the unavoidable fatigue and flat tires. Today, we had the course to ourselves, except for the pair of old-timers who cooked past us on the way up Tennessee, but we’d prefer to not dwell on that.
Luke had reached out to me only the week before, asking what mountain passes were good for cycling up, you know, to have something to work toward over the summer. Only I’d been cooped up and needing to get out of my home office, and if I’m really honest I wasn’t in the mindset to work toward anything right then. So I suggested the following Tuesday. And there we were, not two hours in, dreaming of downhill.
By the end of the ride, my knee would be killing me, bringing with it bad memories of tendonitis that took me out of the ride we did for the filming of Killing Lions. I haven’t had pain this bad in that knee since then, something I’ve accomplished through gradually increasing my activity. It turns out my newfound baseline of fitness isn’t a replacement for consistency. I had to ask the guys to pull over just about every mile of the Vail Pass climb, and even that was pushing it.
So, why did I want to pull over right at the beginning of the ride? Luke’s comment rang so true that it felt like a punch to the gut, that tidal wave of shame that came on all too quickly and all too familiarly. “I live in the flat, and wait for the downhills.”
“How often do I avoid what’s difficult? How much do I bail at the first sign that the adversity I am facing won’t be ending soon?”
How often do I avoid what’s difficult? How much do I bail at the first sign that the adversity I am facing won’t be ending soon? Am I living with my eyes focused on some point in the distance where things get easier and the downhill starts?
The actual count doesn’t matter because the answer that comes is: “too often.”
Which turned out to be one of the reasons we went on this ride. Not everything needs to fall into some oversimplified category like running away from difficulty or running toward ease or just coasting along, but Luke’s comment made me painfully aware of how often I shy away from discomfort of any scale. So, surrounded by beauty, with the excuse of needing to get out of the house for one day please dear sweet lord, I chose something difficult in the hopes that when the stakes are higher I will have practiced the art of perseverance in a hundred small ways.
Print isn’t dead.
If you enjoyed this article, you’d probably love more like it in the And Sons print issue. If you don’t have one of these on your coffee table right now, you should probably go explore our back issue catalog.