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Day 4: Relay Creek Road to Hermosa Park via Durango Mountain Resort

We broke camp at Bolam Pass around 9:15. Today we’d begin our big descent to a lower altitude range for the remainder of the trip. We headed down from the lake on a fast fire road leg to a rough wooden ruin of a cabin marking the former location of the Graysill Mine. Vanadium was mined here first, then uranium, some of which made it into the Manhattan Project. Mining continued here until 1965, which seemed surprising considering the primitive condition and remoteness of the site.

We rode down the muddy singletrack at the head of the canyon containing Relay Creek. At first an up-and-down track through soggy meadows, it hardened up and became a super-fast bombing run gradually descending about 2000′ over some 10 miles. The scenery to our right was amazing. Eventually our red-hot descending singletrack merged with a dirt road, which continued going downwards with some gentle climbs mixed in. Climbing seemed easy now, with the added oxygen. We kept on going, maybe another 6 miles or so, to our lunch spot, after which another bombing descent down the road took us to the uphill “back side” of Durango Mountain Resort, a ski area formerly known by the less PC-ish name of Purgatory, which boasts a great MTB loop that formed the basis of the 1990 World Championship MTB Course. We rode maybe 1/3 of this loop, mostly in a downhill direction. It was lots of fun, and pretty challenging terrain, although (apart from the length of the descents) nothing you wouldn’t see in a nasty technical section of Lynn Woods. At the bottom of this run, approaching the ski lodge headquarters, the very last descending pitch terminated in a series of whoop-de-doo bumps. These proved to be Frank 2’s (the doctor’s) undoing for the day: he took them at speed, and flew off his bike while doing the last one. No one really saw exactly what happened, but having ridden the same bumps myself, it was a fair guess that he didn’t unweight on the ramp up to the bump and got his rear wheel kicked up in the air. He got scraped up really badly, but mercifully he wasn’t hurt any worse than that. Nonetheless he was pretty shaken up and didn’t ride the rest of the day.

While Frank 2 was cleaning up, we lazed around at the resort, looking at civilization (or something purporting to resemble it) for the first time in several days. There being no skiing in July, and few bikers besides us, most people seemed to be there to shop, eat, or just take the ski left up to the top for something to do. It was sort of mall-like and weird. Many tourists seemed to be a) obese and b) from Texas.

We took the ski lift up to the top of the mountain with our bikes, and rode (mostly) down the back side of the resort again through a series of gorgeous rocky singletracks carving through the hills. One more screaming multi-mile dirt road descent later, we were at our final campground of the trip: beautiful Hermosa Park, on a small rocky mini-plateau rising above a meadow through which flowed the calm, meandering headwaters of Hermosa Creek. I bathed in it, which was a glorious experience. Nearby, a smaller tributary creek joined it. Looking at the map later, I saw that this was in fact Relay Creek: we had ridden its entire length, from beginning to end.

We were all a little conscious, I think, that this was our last night together. We sat around the campfire for a long time. I coaxed Scott into telling some stories about his fascinating experiences as a caver working on a series of expeditions to the Huautla Cave system in Oaxaca, one of the deepest cave systems in the world. Listening to these tales, our mountain biking tour suddenly seemed like a little trip down the block to the supermarket.

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