Sopris Soirée
An Alpine Carbondale Capstone
Route Beta
Total Ascent: 8,025’ (3,700’ biking; 4,425’ running)
Total Distance: 40.27 miles (26.06 biking; 14.21 running)
Base to summit: 6,174' to 12,965’
Directions: From town, head south to Prince Creek Road. Take the road until it turns to gravel, and keep going until you reach the Thomas Lakes Trailhead and stash your bike. Follow the obvious trail to the lakes, up the ridgeline, and to the summit. The twin summits are the same height; if you continue to the second summit, it adds roughly a mile and a half and 500’ of vert.
Descend the trail back to your bike and ride the gravel down to the intersection of Prince Creek Road and Dinkle Lake Road. Here, enter the singletrack on Dinkle Link and begin climbing to Next Gen. Overie to Undie will get you, finally, to Father of Ginormous (what you came for). Enjoy the ride, which spits you back out at the road. Single track parallel to Prince Creek Road will take you back to highway 133 and town.
Map Link
While this wasn’t quite a Grand Teton Picnic, maybe someday we will swim Thomas Lake and do it proper. Until then, we can call this the Sopris Soirée. Next time, I’m coming in the spring and bringing my bike AND skis.
“I would never have proposed this,” Fil muttered in the darkness, echoing the same sentiment he had expressed over a beer at El Dorado, the local watering hole, two nights before. I was visiting for the weekend, and after doing some mountain biking around Aspen and Carbondale, I had proposed a cheeky linkup from Fil’s house to the summit of Sopris and back, with some biking tacked on to the end. Fil was about to move to Salt Lake City; what better way, I reasoned, to cap off his time here than tackling the most singular mountain in the area and riding classic single track all the way back to his house?
To Fil’s great credit, he didn’t take much convincing. Sopris, the 12,965-foot guardian of the skyline of Carbondale, is a massive and inspiring peak. The elevation may be mild compared to some of its more famous neighbors in the Elks, but the prominence of this mountain—almost seven thousand feet of gain from Fil’s house to the summit—makes Sopris dominate the lower Roaring Fork Valley, and dominate my imagination whenever I visit.
It was almost five in the morning and we already had a few miles and a thousand feet of gain under our belts. Our headlamps carved a path through the darkness as we puffed up the road, talking about Fil’s upcoming move and the importance of place. A few cold raindrops cooled us off and, thankfully, stopped falling. As the sky began to glow a soft amber, our conversation took a pause and the steady crunch of our tires in the gravel was the only sound around us. We hadn’t seen a soul since passing a couple walking on the sidewalk as we left town. Were they up early, or up very late? Impossible to know.
The sun peeked over the eastern horizon, illuminating our objective for the day. We both pedaled faster. Despite only a couple hours of sleep, we reached the trailhead, and the snacks we had stashed there the day before, in about ten miles and an hour and a half. After eating some bananas and blueberry muffins, we locked up our bikes and departed on foot.
The first four miles of the trail to reach Thomas Lakes are, while a bit rocky, pretty gradual. The path climbed through meadows and groves of aspens which slowly turned to a solid forest of pines as we neared the headwaters of Prince Creek. The lakes were like mirrors, reflecting the imposing Laundry Chutes, the king ski lines off the summit, in their clear surface. Fil and I refilled our water and kept moving.
Once we departed the lakes, the gradual grade turned to steep switchbacks. As we emerged from the treeline, the gravel and dirt path became fields of broken stone. Working our way up the eastern ridge of the mountain, we passed a few parties that had either camped near the lakes or started from the trailhead even earlier than us. “But,” Fil and I kept pointing out to each other with mock self-importance, “They didn’t bike to the trailhead this morning.”
We hopped through the fields of talus and loose rock to gain a false summit. Chossy granite dropped off dramatically on both sides of us. The ridgeline connecting us to the true eastern summit is one of my favorite stretches of running anywhere: a good dirt trail hugs contours the ridge, a gradual grassy slope with stunning views of Avalanche Creek to the south and the remnants of the spring snowpack clinging to the steeper north slope.
Below the bands of snow lay Thomas Lake Bowl and miles of scree and talus. Below even that—roughly sixteen miles away by road and trail according to my watch—I could see Carbondale. The town looked cozy, nestled far below us on the valley floor, slightly obscured by a smoky haze courtesy of some fires in the Pacific Northwest.
Jogging the ridge, and pushing up one last steep section of rocky, choose-your-own-adventure trail, we arrived at the eastern summit at 12,965’. I broke out celebratory Oreos and we reupped on sunscreen; the threat of rain from the morning had turned into a threat of sunburn. Azure blue skies, with just a hint of clouds to our southwest that didn’t give us much concern, hung above us. We toyed with going the extra mile and a half to the twin summit but decided that we were keen on riding some singletrack rather than more running. The ridge connecting the summits, furthermore, is mostly talus-hopping and we wanted to save our ankles for the descent.
Happy with our choice, we made quick but careful progress to return to the treeline. After a couple more miles, we stopped at the lakes again to refill on water, where I promptly dropped my filter into the lake. Whoops. No more water until we get back to the bikes. Dozens of juvenile western tiger salamanders, Colorado’s state amphibian, hung around the shoreline, floating placidly in the cold water. Fil spent ten minutes taking pictures of them.
We moved steadily through the pines which soon turned to aspens. I asked Fil what 16-year-old him would think about where he is today. “He’d be absolutely stoked,” he said. I agreed. Arriving back at the bikes, we pounded some much-needed water and geared up for the final phase of the day. We rode a couple miles of rattling gravel road downhill back to the Dinkle Lake Road/Prince Creek Road junction, where we hopped onto singletrack on Dinkle Link and begin climbing to Next Gen.
After so much downhill, the legs felt surprisingly up to the task of going back up. Cresting the Crown, we the best view of Sopris all day. Tracing our path up the road, through the trees, and along the ridgelines to the summit, it was hard to believe how much ground we had already covered. The climbing for the day finally completed, we took Overie to Undie to arrive at the top of Father of Ginormous (FOG).
FOG is one of Fil’s favorite neighborhood trails, and I soon learned why. Swooping banked turns worked their way through gullies and the thick, shrubby forest. Cheeky jump lines gave us multiple options to descend around almost every turn and berm. The afternoon rains had clearly been consistent in the valley; the forest leaned in along the trail, grabbing at our arms as we blasted over rollers and popped over rock features.
Exiting a turn, I gained some speed and gapped a small kicker. As I landed, a piece of overgrowth pulled my right foot into a tuft of tall grasses. My foot slammed into a rock buried in the vegetation. I managed to stay on my bike, but I prepared for the worst, expecting my white trail runners to turn red with blood any second. After a beat, and no color change, I realized I had avoided anything acutely serious. Testing the foot, something felt quite wrong, but I continued on to link with Fil.
We rode the remaining mile or so of singletrack before being spit out along Prince Creek Road. We cruised the final few miles into town back to Fil’s house. ~40 miles and 8,000’ of vert, according to the watch, suggested that we had earned some lunch, so we went to White House Pizza for a final farewell before I departed for the Front Range and Fil, in a couple weeks, would depart for Salt Lake.
This day felt like an appropriate capstone on Fil’s time in Carbondale. We got to cover so much of his backyard, spend a whole day outside, and eat so much food (because when you do a day like this, you get to eat whatever you want, right?). Backyard adventures are easy when you live in a place where people go for vacation, but it’s really about who you’re with: while I’ll miss having Fil nearby, I look forward to visiting him in Salt Lake.
After hobbling around for two days, I went to confirm what I already knew about my foot. An x-ray confirmed I broke my fourth toe. Now I have a chance to listen to my own advice about resting and the downsides of activity-based friendships. Perhaps I jinxed myself.
Fil writes about his own adventures on his blog, Roaming in the Rockies, which I guess he might have to rename “Wandering in the Wasatch.” I think you’ll find that he’s a much better skier than I am.
A great day - as per usual when we are together. Heal up quick and come visit me in Utah for some proper powder skiing ;)
Heal up fast buddy!