The Leadville Loop

I've been driving guests around this country for over a decade with Vail Powder Cars, and living in it for 32 years before that. But every once in a while I take a day on my own bike, currently a Yamaha FJR1300, a sport-tourer that eats high-altitude switchbacks for breakfast, and ride one of the loops I send our guests on.

The same passes on this loop are the ones we run daily on our Denver to Vail private car service.

Last week I rode the Leadville Loop. 82 miles. Three passes. Never below 8,000 feet. It's the day trip we recommend most often to guests staying with us in Vail, and I wanted to ride it again before I wrote about it.

Here's what I saw.

Out of Vail, Up to the Pass

I-70 east out of Vail. The climb starts almost immediately, and fifteen miles later you're at the top of Vail Pass at 10,662 feet. The rest area up there got rebuilt a few years back. Easiest pullout on the whole loop, roll in, park, and you've got the Tenmile Range laid out south of you.

I stopped because I always stop. After 32 years on this road, that view still doesn't get old.

What most people don't think about, sitting up there: until 1940, this highway didn't exist. The corridor was nothing. Sheep pastures, a sawmill, a few homesteaders down in the Gore Creek bowl. Charles Vail, the highway engineer the pass is named for, routed U.S. 6 through here, and that road eventually became I-70. Without that one decision in 1939, there's no ski resort, no town of Vail, no Beaver Creek, no Vail Powder Cars. The whole valley is downstream of a guy with a transit and a survey map.

I think about that every time I clear the summit.

Copper MountainThe Climb Up Highway 91

Down the east side of Vail Pass and you're at Copper. Most I-70 traffic blows right past it. I peeled off, did the obligatory stop at the Copper sign, then picked up Highway 91 south.

Highway 91 is one of my favorite stretches of road in this part of the state. Twelve miles of steady climbing up to Fremont Pass, and it doesn't get the traffic I-70 does because it doesn't go anywhere most tourists want to go. It goes to Leadville. People going to Leadville know where they're going.

About halfway up, you pass Clinton Gulch Reservoir. In late May the lake is still iced over, solid white sheet, doesn't break up until June some years, with the Tenmile Range filling the sky behind it. I pulled off at the dam pullout and just stood there for a minute. There's a stillness to a frozen lake at 11,000 feet that doesn't translate to a photograph, but I took one anyway.

Five more miles of climbing and you're at the top of the pass.

Fremont PassAnd the Climax Mine

Fremont Pass tops out at 11,318 feet and dumps you straight into one of the strangest landscapes in Colorado: the Climax Molybdenum Mine.

People love to call Climax a "former" mine. It's not. It reopened in 2012 after a 17-year shutdown, and it's running today, Freeport-McMoRan owns it now. The terraced benches you see cut into the mountainside go up past 12,000 feet, the highest open-pit mining benches in the world.

What used to sit at the top of this pass was a town called Climax. At 11,341 feet, it was the highest incorporated town in North America. Eighteen hundred people, post office, school, the works. In 1961 and '62 they dismantled the entire town, building by building, and moved it twelve miles down the hill to Leadville to make room for the open pit. There's nothing left of Climax now except the mine itself.

That's something I think about a lot riding through here. Whole towns built and unbuilt in a generation. The Eagle River starts its life right here, in a pond at the top of this pass, and it flows north all the way past my front door at 3105 Bellflower before it joins the Colorado. Half the water I drink at home starts as snowmelt at the edge of an active mine.

That's the West.

Into Leadville

From Climax, you drop into the broad Arkansas valley and roll into Leadville at 10,152 feet, the highest incorporated city in the United States. (The highest town is Alma, but that's a Colorado technicality having to do with population at the time of incorporation. Leadvillians will correct you if you get it wrong.)

I rode straight down Harrison Avenue, the main drag, and a National Historic Landmark district besides. Seventy square blocks of Victorian storefronts, most still in use. In the 1880s, after silver was found in California Gulch, this town hit nearly 15,000 people and was the second-biggest city in Colorado after Denver. There were ninety-some saloons. The Tabor Opera House had Oscar Wilde on its stage.

I parked in front of the Silver Dollar Saloon, "1879" right there on the front, and they mean it. The Silver Dollar has been pouring drinks on Harrison Avenue since the year after the boom started.

A block down is Melanzana.

If you've spent any time in Colorado outdoor circles, you know the name. Melanzana makes fleece, designed, sewn, and sold all out of that one building, by people who live in Leadville and actually wear what they're making. You can't order it online. You have to show up, wait in line, and try things on. People drive up from Denver for it.

And it's worth the drive. The fit is right, the fleece is the right weight, the stitching holds up. The gear lasts. I've got a Micro Grid hoodie I've put through a decade of abuse and it still looks new, and at the kind of altitude we work in, "still looks new after a decade" is not a small claim.

There's a Golden Burro Cafe sign visible from out front. That's the old standby on Harrison, been there since the 1930s.

Leadville is one of those towns that's pivoted hard from mining to outdoor recreation. The Leadville 100, the 100-mile foot race and the 100-mile mountain bike race, bring altitude-trained athletes from around the world. Walk into any coffee shop on Harrison in August and you'll hear a half-dozen languages. But the bones of the town are still mining. Every other building has a plaque. Every other family has a story that goes back four generations.

I had a sandwich, refilled my water bottle (you drink twice as much at 10,000 feet, and that took me a few years to figure out), and got back on the road.

North Out of TownTennessee Pass and Camp Hale

Heading north on Highway 24 you climb gently to Tennessee Pass at 10,424 feet. The summit is unassuming. Small parking area, a memorial to the 10th Mountain Division, and that's about it. But Tennessee Pass is the divide between the Arkansas River watershed (which drains east to the Mississippi) and the Eagle River watershed (which drains west to my front yard). Cross this pass and the water knows you're heading home.

Right at the summit sits Ski Cooper, the little ski area where the 10th Mountain Division trained in 1942. Opened that year as a military training hill and has been operating ever since. Family-run, cheap by Colorado standards, and home to some of the best natural-snow skiing in the state because it's so high and so far east of the bigger resorts.

A few miles down the north side, the valley opens up into the flat, broad Pando Valley. That's Camp Hale.

In April 1942 the Army broke ground here on a training camp for the 10th Mountain Division, the only American military unit ever specifically trained for mountain and winter warfare. Fifteen thousand soldiers lived in this valley at the camp's peak. They trained on skis and ropes through that winter and the next, deployed to the northern Italian Apennines in February 1945, and scaled a 1,500-foot cliff at Riva Ridge to break the German line.

The reason any of this matters to anyone standing in Vail: Pete Seibert, one of Vail Mountain's co-founders, was a 10th Mountain Division veteran. He trained right here. After the war he came back to Colorado with a vision of a ski mountain, and he built it on the slope above the valley where I now live. Dozens of other 10th Mountain veterans went on to found or manage more than sixty Colorado ski resorts. Aspen. A-Basin. Vail. The entire modern Colorado ski industry essentially walked out of this valley in 1945.

The camp buildings were dismantled in the 1960s, and the land was made a National Monument in October 2022, Camp Hale–Continental Divide National Monument, 53,804 acres. You can pull off at the memorial campground and walk among the old concrete foundations. The buildings are gone. The grid is still there in the ground.

I always stop. I'm not sure I can explain exactly why.

Across the BridgeInto Red Cliff

A few miles north of Camp Hale, Highway 24 crosses the Eagle River canyon on a steel arch bridge that's been there since 1940. Open-spandrel deck-arch, painted green. When you're driving over it you don't really get it. You have to come at it from underneath.

I peeled off into Red Cliff and rode down to the old road that runs under the bridge. From down there you see the whole thing, 200-some feet of green-painted steel spanning the canyon, sandstone cliffs rising up to meet it, the Eagle River cutting through underneath. Built the same year Charles Vail surveyed the highway it carries.

Red Cliff itself is a 270-person town that most Highway 24 traffic never stops in. The county seat used to be here, back before Vail and Beaver Creek existed and mining was the only game in the valley. Now it's a small residential village where a lot of the people who work in Vail can actually afford to live.

I stopped at Mango's Mountain Grill. The sign says "Est. 1990," but I remember Mango's when it was just a little taco stand, before they moved into this brick building with the upstairs balcony patio. Same family, same food. Thirty-five years of slow growth in a town that doesn't change much.

If you stop one place for food on this whole loop, stop at Mango's.

Gilman

Out of Red Cliff, Highway 24 climbs out of the canyon and traces the rim of Battle Mountain. Four miles north of town, on the left, you start seeing buildings clinging to the cliff edge. Neat rows of small pastel houses, a schoolhouse, what looks like a hospital. All with broken windows and peeling paint. Nobody home.

That's Gilman.

I pulled off at the overlook pullout, there's a dirt turnout on the canyon side where you can stop and take it in safely. The town sits on a 600-foot cliff right above the Eagle River. From the right angle you can see the schoolyard.

Gilman was a working company town from 1886 until 1985. Most of the 20th century it was owned by the New Jersey Zinc Company, producing zinc, lead, silver. In 1984 the EPA shut down the Eagle Mine because the tailings were turning the Eagle River orange, heavy metals leaching into the drainage that runs right through our valley. By June 1985 the last 14 families were ordered out. The town is private property, strictly off-limits, and trespassers get prosecuted. Don't try it. The view from the pullout is what you get.

What you can't see from the photo:

I knew a guy named Lawrence Chadwick. Excavator operator. Ran heavy equipment up and down this valley most of his life. He grew up in Gilman as a kid, back when it was a working company town with a school and a hospital and an infirmary and a bowling alley.

He told me once that they used to call this valley, the valley I now live in, the valley most people in the world know as Vail, Starvation Valley.

Before the highway, before the ski mountain, before any of it. The money was all up the hill at Gilman and Leadville. Down here on the Eagle River, you were nobody.

There were lettuce farms. Sheep ranches. A sawmill. That was the whole place.

I think about Lawrence every time I ride past Gilman.

The town that fed his childhood became a Superfund site. The valley nobody wanted became one of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country. All in the span of one man's life.

That happens here. The whole arc of this country plays out over a few decades, and if you've been here long enough, you've watched it.

Down Battle MountainInto Minturn

From Gilman, Highway 24 winds down Battle Mountain into Minturn. Older than Vail by half a century. A lot of the original miners from the Eagle Mine actually lived down here and walked or rode up to Gilman to work.

The Minturn Saloon has been here since 1901, we wrote about it in our restaurants piece. The Minturn Market on Saturday mornings in summer is the best people-watching in the valley. Rocky Mountain Taco is my go-to. Get the Hippy Crack Burrito and thank me later.

But the Minturn stop I want to flag, if you ride: The Clinic, right on Highway 24 as you come into town. Marshall Ringler runs it.

It's a motorcycle and snowmobile shop, but calling it a shop undersells it. It's the best little moto shop in the valley, and possibly the state. I gave the FJR a full tune-up there. Fork rebuild, oil, filter, coolant, gear oil. Marshall had every part in stock. Every part. I don't know how he does it out of a small shop in a 1,000-person town, but he does.

If you ride and you spend any time in this part of Colorado, you should know where Marshall is.

The Clinic. 23698 Highway 24, Minturn. (970) 827-5280.

Tell Marshall that George sent you.

From The Clinic it's about ten minutes back up I-70 to Vail.

What This Loop Really Is

It's three passes, 82 miles, six or seven good stops. You can do it in five hours if you're efficient. You can stretch it into all day if you want to walk Harrison Avenue, sit on the balcony at Mango's, and actually read the plaques at Camp Hale.

But what the loop really is, if you let it be:

A tour of how this country actually got made.

The 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale that built the ski industry in our front yard. The Climax Mine that's still running. The Eagle Mine at Gilman that killed the river and abandoned a town. The lettuce farms in the bowl that became Vail. Charles Vail's highway in 1940. Pete Seibert's mountain in 1962. Lawrence Chadwick's childhood, somewhere in between, watching it all from the cliff at Gilman.

All of it inside an 82-mile loop you can do between breakfast and dinner.

A Few Practical NotesIf You Want to Drive It Yourself

• It's all above 8,000 feet. Drink more water than you think you need, and don't try this on your first day in Vail. Give yourself a day or two to acclimate first.
• All three passes are paved and open year-round in normal conditions, but Fremont and Tennessee can both get nasty in a winter storm. Check CDOT November through April.
• Gas up before you leave Vail. Stations in Leadville and Minturn, nothing in between.
• Phone service is patchy. Download maps before you go.
• The Gilman overlook is on Highway 24 about four miles north of Red Cliff. Easier to spot going south than going north. Either way, the town's on the cliff side of the road, and you can pull off safely.