Every other weekend in the winter months, there is a group of dedicated motorheads who race their 4x4's on the thick ice of Georgetown Reservoir along I-70 at about 8500ft. I'd heard of these events but finally made it up to spectate. What what a crazy event it is! We made it just in time for the "Cheater" Class of racing, which is basically the all-out customized purebred element of these guys. Most of them use old Jeep chassis retrofitted with incredibly suped-up V-8 engines powering tires sporting 1.5 inch spikes for traction as they race around a course of roughly eight turns. It's loud, it's powerful, it's excessive, and it's American for better or worse. I loved it, naturally.
After getting our fill of guttural powersports, we drove (in my stock 95 Civic) a ways up Guanella Pass and strapped on the snowshoes for a late afternoon hike up to the solitude of Naylor Lake.
I like the dichotomy of this trip to the mountains: the gluttonous excess of horsepower and pollution from the racers and then the utter quiet isolation of watching the sun set from ice at 11,000ft. We were literally the last people on the trail; didn't encounter another soul on the way up or down, and did the last half of the hike out to the trailhead with our headlamps guiding the way. It was sublime.
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