CRESTED BUTTE — In a postcard-picturesque state laced with an encyclopedia’s worth of history, there’s challenge aplenty when it comes to establishing genuine Colorado icons.
Yet over the course of 30 years, the tiny town of Crested Butte (pop. 1,529) has managed to stake its claim as Colorado’s once and future empire of all things fat tire. It continues to celebrate the sport of mountain biking that has grown up around it with an iconic air at once admirable and irreverent.
Local lore holds that a group of guys from Crested Butte’s Grubstake Bar first rode their balloon-wheeled clunkers over 12,705-foot Pearl Pass to win the affection of women from Aspen in 1976. While few can recall the romantic details of the tryst, the ultimate seduction proved to be the surrounding terrain. It eventually inspired locals such as Don Cook to embark on a trail-building mission that continues to this day under the direction of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association.
The spawn of that enterprise is recognized during Crested Butte’s annual Fat Tire Bike Week, the world’s original mountain bike festival that celebrated its 30th birthday last week.
Among the five-day soiree’s festivities were cycle-centric events ranging from the annual Wildflower Rush/Mountain States Cup races used to determine state champions in downhill and four-cross competition to the decidedly less relevant Chainless Downhill World Championship race coasting cog-free from the surrounding Kebler Pass summit into town.
Those events and others drew huge crowds, with just fewer than 1,000 starters in the various Wildflower Rush mountain bike races and more than 150 registered (and dozens more renegade racers) for the Chainless Downhill, the vast majority riding rusty cruisers in costume and many on homemade bikes.
“Crested Butte is one of the hubs of mountain biking, and I think everybody that bikes appreciates all the singletrack we have around here,” said 14-year local Ben Eaton after competing in his first Chainless Downhill. “It brings a lot of enthusiasts, and enthusiasts love silly events like this.”
Among those enthusiasts was adaptive sports athlete Chris Waddell of Park City, Utah, a five-time Paralympic skiing gold medalist recently named to the National Ski Hall of Fame. Waddell, paralyzed below the waist, used a four- wheeled, hand-cranked bike designed and built by Crested Butte locals Dave Penney and Scott Gilman of Mobility Fabrication to reach the summit of Africa’s tallest peak, Kilimanjaro, a year ago.
He used the same bike to take part in the Chainless Downhill and portions of the Bridges of the Butte 24-hour “townie” bike tour used as a fundraiser for the Crested Butte Adaptive Sports Center.
“I’ve done a lot of pack racing, and this was nuts,” Waddell said of his first chainless race. “In this race, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the people in front of me. There was some sketchiness going on out there, but it was really fun.”
Stronger than ever
Fun has always been job one for Crested Butte’s fat-tire devotees. They’ve set the stage for the current cast of characters celebrating the culture of off-road riding in places such as Breckenridge, Fruita, Boulder, Steamboat Springs, Eagle and Aspen. The sport remains some 50 million strong, according to a study conducted by the Boulder-based International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA) and component manufacturer Shimano.
Yet, as evidenced by that early ride over Pearl Pass, mountain biking’s remote Rocky Mountain hometown has always seemed to attract a more resilient breed, willing to work a little harder for its fun at elevations upward of 9,000 feet, all the while flaunting its free spirit.
“I don’t think I’ve been involved in the mountain bike culture long enough to really understand the full scope of it. But with Crested Butte, it’s always impressive to me how many people are on their bikes and just enjoying the time on their bikes,” said Team Yeti racer Chris Boice, 26, of Albuquerque, pro men’s division winner of Sunday’s state championship downhill race. “The people here truly love riding. And I think it makes it a truly unique event because of the people that live in the town. There are a couple other places you might see that, but I don’t think anywhere as prominent as you see here.”
America’s dream trails
Never known so much as a downhiller’s destination as it is for the more than 400 miles of singletrack trails sprawling the surrounding southern Elk Mountain range, the area was recently named by readers of Bike magazine as the “Best Destination” for mountain bikers in North America. The lauded 401 Trail was awarded honorable mention as the nation’s “Trail of the Year” in 2009.
Now the area is starting to make headway on the downhill front with a series of new lift-served trails on the slopes of Crested Butte Mountain Resort.
The added attraction of increased “gravity” offerings dovetails nicely with the existing amenities, including a dirt jump park for kids at the base of a world-class paved bike path connecting the mountain resort to the town below — home of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. There, the notion of “Bike to Work Month” is largely scoffed at by a community that takes pride in pedaling around town 12 months a year.
“The townie is the way to get around,” said Erin English of the Crested Butte Adaptive Sports Center, which expects to earn some $25,000 in pledges from 250 participants riding in the Bridges of the Butte fundraiser. “You see it year-round here. It’s the preferred mode of transportation.”
Arguably as much as skiing, fat-tire cycling in all its incarnations has played a huge role in establishing the town’s identity over the course of 30 years. And the enthusiasm isn’t showing any signs of old age.
“We are working hard to reinvent and re-energize this iconic event,” said Scott Still of the Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce in regard to Fat Tire Bike Week. “It really is a big part of Crested Butte’s history.”
