{"id":2673,"date":"2019-01-18T00:21:19","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T00:21:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisrivard.com\/?p=2673"},"modified":"2019-01-18T00:21:19","modified_gmt":"2019-01-18T00:21:19","slug":"the-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/the-pass\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was climbing in the gym with a friend visiting from Colorado yesterday and I was telling him about my trip to Ouray and how beautiful Western Colorado is. I drove South through Lakewood and then West on 285 toward Fairplay and as I was driving at night by myself listening to The Firn Line<\/a>, I remembered that I had been on this road before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2001 I flew out from D.C. to race the Leadville 100 (mountain bike). Before ending up in Leadville, my girlfriend (at the time) and I stopped to ride the Colorado Trail from Kenosha Pass. It was a sunny August morning and I remember I was just wearing a cycling jersey and had some arm warmers and a shell stuffed in the pocket of my jersey. We rode for about 5 miles and were caught in the (2nd most) scariest summer Colorado storm I’ve been in*. It started to hail and freezing rain fell. I gave my girlfriend the shell and put on the arm warmers and we rode as fast as we could on singletrack back to the car at the pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time we got back my lips were blue and I was shivering with hypothermia. We cranked the heat in the car and just sat there trying to warm up. That’s when it happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A flat bed semi truck came up over the pass, slid across into oncoming traffic and took the top off a passenger car going West down the pass. I remember getting out of the car and running over to the car. Other cars started to pull off and traffic slowed to a stop. I walked over to the car not really thinking or knowing what to expect. There was a little girl curled up in the fetal position in the back seat – the driver and front passenger were both deceased. In what was probably only 15 seconds later more drivers came up to the scene and a man identified himself as a paramedic. That’s when I turned and walked away, realizing there wasn’t anything I could do. I got into the warm car and shortly afterwards continued the drive through Buena Vista and on to Leadville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recognized the landscape last week as I started driving up Kenosha Pass. A flood of history came back to me and I gripped the steering wheel tighter, just wanting to be over the pass and down the other side – on my way West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*The scariest Colorado summer storm I’ve ever been in was trying to climb Handies Peak from American Basin. It’s the only time I’ve experienced Flash\/Boom lightening. It’s terrifying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh yeah. This episode <\/a>of The Firn Line was excellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was climbing in the gym with a friend visiting from Colorado yesterday and I was telling him about my trip to Ouray and how beautiful Western Colorado is. I drove South through Lakewood and then West on 285 toward Fairplay and as I was driving at night by myself listening to The Firn Line, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sartor-resartus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}