Crested Butte, Colorado, has long been one of my favorite places on planet Earth. This magical mountain destination lies in a majestic valley at the very end of the pavement. As you turn off US Highway 50 in Gunnison and begin motoring up Highway 135 toward Crested Butte, you slowly wind up a verdant valley, eventually ending in the idyllic hamlet of Crested Butte. The pavement keeps going a few more miles up the mountain to the resort of Mount Crested Butte, but after passing a few more houses beyond the ski resort, the asphalt ends abruptly, and gravel takes over. To the east, west, and north, the only exit from Crested Butte (aka CB) is via gravel roads of varying roughness... or the valley's some 700 miles of singletrack.

Here, at the end of the road, rocky mountain peaks tower above you, forcing you to crane your neck to take in their lofty summits. As you round each corner, the view changes, revealing yet another rugged peak that was previously hidden from view. The further back you journey into the Elk Range, the more successive mountains you'll see trotting off into the distance. The Elks are renowned as some of the most rugged mountains in the state of Colorado, and yet the West Elks—the area spanning roughly from Crested Butte over to Crawford and Paonia—see very little traffic to their peaks. The only 14ers in the Elk Range are located close to Aspen and Snowmass, and so the vast majority of the peak climbers in the state seem to skip over the rocky spires found in the West Elks.

The same can't be said for the area's singletrack trails, though. Crested Butte is one of two towns in the USA that can claim to be the birthplace of mountain biking, and unlike the hateful anti-mountain biking sentiment found in Marin County, California, Crested Butte is a haven for mountain bikers. CBMBA, the local trail building and advocacy organization, is the oldest mountain bike association in the world. Not only have they maintained this trail system for decades, but they continue to expand this incredible network, keeping CB one of the best places to ride a mountain bike on the planet. The quality of the trails here is no secret, and every year they are mobbed by more and more riders (and now hikers and trail runners) looking to get their fill of the delectable alpine singletrack.

At this point, I can't say how many times I've been to Crested Butte—yet it doesn't matter. Not only would I visit CB every year, in years past, I've gone three times, four times, maybe more in one single mountain biking season. Counting the visits isn't worth the effort, but of course, counting the trails is. Despite my many visits here, there are still so many trails that I still need to ride in CB.

My Latest Stop in Crested Butte

This incredible mountain town served as the first lengthy stop on our van life excursion, with a healthy two and a half week stay. Despite how many times I've visited in the past, immersing myself in the region for two and a half weeks was officially my longest visit thus far. Getting to soak in the mountains for such a long period of time was a glorious experience!

While I had ridden all of Crested Butte's most renowned rides, on my agenda for this visit, I wanted to check off a number of obscure trails and routes in the Cement Creek drainage. Cement Creek doesn't receive nearly the same amount of trail traffic as other areas closer to downtown CB. This is partially due to the drive required to get down there, but also due to the difficulty of the riding. In any direction you choose, you can expect to climb for thousands of vertical feet, with most of the trails requiring substantial hike-a-biking. The one ride in the drainage with more manageable climbs, Reno - Flag - Bear - Deadman's, is consequently the most popular. So, the rest of the rides I had to tackle were on the more brutal end of the scale.

While I was pleased to check off two big routes that I had never ridden before, ironically, I ended up spending most of the time I wasn't working behind my computer re-riding a whole slew of the classics. Some were due to friends inviting me out on rides. Others were simply convenient. And yet others, like Doctor Park, I realized I hadn't actually been on in years. While exploring new trails is one of my top priorities in life, sometimes you just have to go back and re-ride the top trails over and over again. The classics like 401 and Doctor Park are classics because they truly le creme de la creme of singletrack mountain biking.

Finally, I took the opportunity to try something that I rarely do in Crested Butte: hiking. My girlfriend and I checked out Scarp Ridge, which I only learned of while doing research a couple years ago for a hiking guide to serve as a companion to all the mountain bike content on FATMAP.

I first visited Crested Butte in 2008, and I cannot believe it took me 13 years to make it up Scarp Ridge! This jaw-dropping hike is not only one of the most beautiful places in Colorado, but it's also not brutally difficult to access. If you do choose to hike down and out onto Scarp Ridge, you'll have to contend with extreme exposure above a thousand-foot cliff... but that's exactly why this ridge is so damn stunning!

Planning the Hike up Scarp Ridge

While I had previously uploaded a route near Scarp Ridge, I wasn't entirely sure what the best route for our planned hike would. Would we just hike to the high point? Would we cross the knife-edge ridge itself? Should we try to turn the hike into a loop? Based on the OSM data in the map, it looked like all of these options would be plausible. And none of the external sources I had checked offered a clear answer to this question.

While Christine was in excellent hiking shape and was more than capable of any of these options up Scarp Ridge, the only hiking I'd done all summer consisted of pushing my bike up steep mountainsides. I was a bit nervous about getting in over my head, so I pulled up FATMAP's Adventure Studio to plan the hike. With Adventure Studio, you can plan custom adventure itineraries, and after you save your route plan, FATMAP will tell you how long the planned route is, how much climbing and descending it has, and a few other statistics. With these accurate stats, you can get a good grasp of whether or not the route you're planning to do is within your grasp.

Since I knew the ultimate destination, having dropped a waypoint on the ridge, I just needed to figure out the best way to get there. So, I planned three possible itineraries:

One route as a loop:

One route as an out-and-back:

And a second option with bonus miles on a different stretch of trail:

While the loop looked intriguing, based on the OSM data, it looked like most of the return down the mountain would simply follow gravel 4x4 roads, which doesn't make for great hiking. So, we opted for the out-and-back option.

As we drove up toward the trailhead early in the morning, we spotted the singletrack at the planned trailhead, but we also saw obvious signs telling us to keep driving further up toward the Scarp Ridge (aka Snark Snark Ridge) trailhead. We kept on driving several more miles up the mountain to the signed Scarp Ridge Trailhead, and found ourselves much higher than we had planned to start. This was a great bonus for my lack of hiking fitness, but it also shows that you can't beat true on-the-ground experience when writing up route recommendations.

This is the version of Scarp Ridge we ended up doing:

Even after 13 years of traveling to Crested Butte, not only am I finding new adventures and trails to explore, but the classics somehow don't seem to ever get old. Even though the crowds are now downright insane on holiday weekends, I'll still continue to add myself to the number of travelers visiting Crested Butte for years to come.

Two Weeks in Paradise: Peak Summer Season in Crested Butte, Colorado

My Latest Stop in Crested Butte

Planning the Hike up Scarp Ridge