Durango MTB 100

Ultra-epic race in Durango, 100 km long. The 100 miles course (3 laps) was cancelled because of the apocalyptic weather conditions. Unfortunately, the last 5 miles or so are missing from the gps track (battery died) – I’ll try to manually edit the track and upload it later as a separate trip. It would add between 1000 and 2000 feet of climbing I’d estimate. You’d probably also need to subtract 2 or 3 miles or so as another rider made me turn around (around mile 40) and sent me back and forth on the trail (believing we were heading the wrong way but later correcting ourselves).

The course below shows the two laps, the third lap (for the 100 mile race, which was cancelled as I mentioned) would have been the same as lap 2 but ridden in the other direction. Looking at the Gmap, lap 1 is the upper loop, lap 2 the adjacent one below it.

It was raining, hailing, storming, with sections of nice weather in between – that’s when I took the pictures. The course was a complete mudfest – the singletrack around mile 15-16 for instance was a marsh. Some other parts kept up relatively well. Most of the singletrack climbing was ridiculously hard because of the mud and chainsuck. Luckily, most climbing during lap 2 was on a forest service road and so this part was a bit ‘easier’. The downhill singletrack on lap 2, together with the section of the Colorado trail in lap 1 were a lot of fun and my favorite parts of the ride.

The initial 2 mile climb and the last couple of (downhill) miles on each lap are part of the 1990 Durango World Cup race course – both the climb and the downhill were very slippery – gentle treatment of the front brake on the descent was paramount to avoid mud-bath inducing endo’s.

Some notes on my rating: obviously, it got the hardest rating on physical difficulty. The overall technicality of the course on the other hand wasn’t that high. The four stars are deserved by only a few spots here and there, overall I’d give it three. That being said, there were numerous tough stream crossings (even a wide river needed to be crossed at some point, the bike obviously was to be carried over here) and hard mud problems, so riding these (or even doing honorable attempts) definitely requires some technical skills.