The state’s best high school mountain bike racers — and their families — will compete in Glenwood Springs this fall, with plenty of locals vying for the podium’s top spots.
The Colorado High School Cycling League will come to Colorado Mountain College’s Spring Valley campus on Oct. 20-23 for its state championship, a major christening, of sorts, of the college’s new trail systems. According to a release from CMC, composed with assistance from the league, the race will bring 800 racers and around 2,000 people to the valley.
“We’re really excited to bring people up and show them Spring Valley, show it off,” Jeanne Golay, a Glenwood High School Dirt Demons coach, CMC Foundation staffer and former road racing champion, said. “Building these trails was an effort to create an amenity that will benefit our educational programming as well as the community.”
CMC has sponsored the league since 2015 and the Leadville campus has hosted races. But over the past five-plus years, Golay spearheaded an effort to develop a mountain bike trail system on the Spring Valley campus with multiple purposes: educational, recreational and competitive. Bringing the high school league to Glenwood Springs, however, was a major driver.
Within the last year, the college completed more than three miles of new trails on top of an existing network. In the process, a three-track, multi-difficulty 5.5-mile course designed with high school athletes in mind was developed. Loops around the track range in difficulty from green to double black diamond.
“This Spring Valley campus is an amazing property and the trails can be really fun,” Kate Rau, executive director of the Colorado High School Cycling League, said. “I think the kids will really like it.”
The league is broken down by gender and experience: varsity, junior varsity, sophomore and freshman. All competitors in a classification race on the course at the same time.
Four teams represent the Roaring Fork Valley: Basalt-Aspen high schools composite team, Colorado Rocky Mountain School, Glenwood Springs High School and Roaring Fork High School. In terms of teams to population, Rau said the valley is “right up there” with some of the highest density in the state. And the locals compete at a high level, as well.
At the state championship, the Basalt-Aspen team finished fifth in its division. CRMS finished sixth in theirs, directly ahead of Glenwood Springs. Roaring Fork, in its second season of competition, finished 13th out of 41 teams in its division.
Individually, the valley placed four athletes in their respective top five in state. CRMS’s Nina Villafranco finished fourth in freshman girls and Canyon Cherney took second in freshman boys and Glenwood Springs’ Sam Meskin took third in sophomore girls and Chloe Lutgring took second in girls varsity. Entering her senior year, Lutgring watched Durango’s Bailey Cioppa graduate after being the lone competitor to beat her, making her the de facto favorite going into this year’s race season.
Cioppa finished 40 seconds ahead of Lutgring on her “home course” in Durango in state. Lutgring hopes that the familiarity and staying at home will benefit her in this year’s finals.
“I think it will be a big advantage to be able to sleep in my own bed the night before our biggest competition,” Lutgring said in CMC’s release.
The state championship was held the last three years in Durango. It was previously believed that, should Spring Valley get the nod for 2022, it may remain a contender for the bids in 2023 and ’24, but now the expectation is that the course will be enlisted for regular season races in the future.
According to the league’s 2021 impact report, races made an average economic impact on the communities they competed in of $2.2 million per race. This, however, was based on average race attendance exceeding 12,000. Per dollar spent on funding, the average economic payback ratio was $120.58. The direct impact to the communities per attendee and rider was logged at $174.
Just over half of community visitors stay in paid lodging, according to the report, while 22% camped. In conjunction with Roaring Fork School District, the championships will offer primitive camping just across from the campus on district-owned land.
The racing season begins in Frisco for local riders on Aug. 27. They’ll then travel to Leadville and Snowmass on consecutive weekends before concluding the regular season in Eagle once again on Oct. 8.
The finalization of Spring Valley hosting was made public in April before being released by CMC on Monday.