CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 547 km loop that starts and ends near Denver, about 9 h 10 of riding. On the way it passes Breckenridge, Aspen and Georgetown. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 3,400 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. Long stretches are under trees.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For 17 km this is Lariat Loop Scenic and Historic Byway, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Denver earns its nickname honestly: one of the steps of the State Capitol is marked as exactly one mile above sea level, and from the city the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains fills the western horizon like a jagged wall. The city spreads across the high plains at the foot of the mountains, a big, sunny, sprawling place where the snowy peaks are visible from almost every street on a clear day.
Breckenridge sits at about 2,900 metres in a high valley of the Colorado Rockies, below the Tenmile Range, and the air is thin enough to make you breathe a little harder walking up Main Street. The town began as a gold camp in 1859, when prospectors found gold in the Blue River, and it boomed and busted several times before becoming one of the most popular ski resorts in the country. Its long main street of brightly painted Victorian buildings, now full of shops, bars and restaurants, is one of the largest historic districts in Colorado.
Aspen was a silver town before it was a ski town, and the old buildings still show it. In the 1880s, miners poured into the Roaring Fork Valley after rich veins of silver were found in the hills, and the little camp became one of the biggest producers in the country in only a few years. The Hotel Jerome opened in 1889, and the streets filled with banks, opera houses and saloons. When the silver price crashed in 1893, the town went quiet for half a century, until skiers arrived after the Second World War and turned it into a resort.
Silver built Georgetown. In the 1860s, prospectors working up Clear Creek found rich silver ore in the mountains above this narrow valley west of Denver, and within a few years the town became one of the most important mining centres in Colorado, nicknamed the Silver Queen of the Rockies. When silver prices crashed in 1893, the boom ended, but the town survived, and today its streets of Victorian houses, brick storefronts and wooden churches form one of the best-preserved historic mining districts in the American West.
Return visit. Read the place description above.