The story
Gravel deserves a grand tour
Every race starts as a conviction that a place and a moment belong together. Ours: gravel is in its golden age, the Colorado high country is where it hits hardest, and no one has yet run a multi-day gravel stage race over its high passes.
The moment
Gravel is ready for a grand tour in the high country
Gravel pulled roadies off the pavement and mountain bikers off the singletrack and gave them one shared thing: long days on dirt, self-reliant, in good country. It grew a professional class, a media following, and a calendar of one-day classics like Unbound and SBT GRVL. It has started to grow stage races too: the Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder runs a multi-day gravel stage race in Oregon, and Life Time runs a three-day mountain-bike stage race right here in Leadville. What no one runs yet is a multi-day gravel stage race with a general classification over Colorado's high alpine passes, the format that made road cycling legendary, on the roads that suit it best.
The place
Leadville is already a cycling town
The Leadville Trail 100 is a bucket-list race the sport's best build their seasons around; Lance Armstrong set its mountain-bike course record here in 2009. Aspen, ninety minutes away, is a cycling capital. And the terrain is unmatched: the highest through-roads in North America, a century of mining roads, five passes above 11,900 feet within reach of one town, three million acres of public land, and a private ranch that opens ground a public-land permit alone can't.
Leadville sits at 10,152 feet, the highest city in North America. A race that starts there and climbs from there is hard in a way that means something. Finishing it is a story you keep.
The conviction
Build it right, not just loud
Put the moment and the place together and the race takes shape: point-to-point days linked by the great passes, a cumulative-time overall, King and Queen of the Mountains on the climbs, and a moving village that sleeps on a ranch in the wilderness.
It doesn't exist yet. That's the opportunity. The vision lives on this site; the real operating detail lives in the operator playbook, so this is a race a director could actually stand up, not a slogan. The ground operation already exists in Leadville today: the lodge and the ranch. The permits, sanctioning and sponsors decide when the first edition runs.
Heritage
Roads with a past
Almost every road on the candidate course was built for something other than bikes: ore wagons, stagecoaches, a railroad, then cars. A short timeline of how they got here.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1877–1879 | Prospectors working the gold-mining leftovers of California Gulch learn in the mid-1870s that the heavy sand clogging their sluices is a silver-rich lead ore, and trace it to lode deposits on the hills above. Leadville is founded in 1877 and incorporated in 1878. By 1880 it is one of the largest and richest silver camps in the world, with more than 15,000 people. |
| 1879–1880 | A toll wagon road over Mosquito Pass, above 13,000 feet, opens from Fairplay to Leadville. For a short time it carries a stream of freight wagons and stagecoaches every day, then falls quiet once the railroad reaches Leadville in 1880. |
| 1887 | The Colorado Midland Railway crosses the Continental Divide at Hagerman Pass through the Hagerman Tunnel, at about 11,500 feet the highest railroad tunnel in the world when it opens. |
| 1893–1918 | The Midland moves to the lower Busk–Ivanhoe Tunnel in 1893 and uses the Hagerman line only briefly after that. The railroad stops running in 1918 and most of the line is scrapped in the early 1920s. |
| 1922–1942 | The automobile takes over the old grade. The Busk–Ivanhoe bore reopens as the Carlton Tunnel, a toll road tunnel for cars on a state highway that follows the railroad route, until the state stops maintaining the road in the early 1940s. Across the district, the mining and rail grades become the gravel and dirt roads that four-wheel drivers, hikers and cyclists use today. |
| 1983 and 1994 | After the Climax molybdenum mine above town shuts down and Leadville's economy is hit hard, the Leadville Trail 100 run is held for the first time in 1983 to bring visitors back. A 100-mile mountain-bike race follows in 1994 and draws riders from around the world. |
| 2006 onward | Gravel racing grows from small grassroots events, among them the first Dirty Kanza in Kansas in 2006 with a few dozen riders (now Unbound Gravel), into a sport with thousands of entrants, a professional class and a national calendar. |
Sources: Leadville, Colorado (Wikipedia) · Visit Leadville Twin Lakes, Mosquito Pass · Park County Mosquito Pass chronology · Hagerman Tunnel · Colorado Midland Railway · Busk–Ivanhoe Tunnel · Leadville Race Series history · Leadville Trail 100 · Unbound Gravel
Grand Tour Gravel is independent and not affiliated with Life Time or the Leadville Race Series.