The Leadville Trail 100 sets off from Sixth and Harrison in the pre-dawn dark this morning, and for the first time in the modern history of the Race Across the Sky, the field will not run the Powerline. The Willow Fire — the same blaze that forced a wave of cancellations across Colorado's race calendar earlier this summer — closed Hagerman Pass Road, Sugarloaf Mountain and the Powerline climb, and organisers have redrawn the opening and closing sections of the hundred-mile course as a result.
Under the revised routing, runners head west out of Leadville and around Turquoise Lake as usual, but then turn and come back east around the lake, rejoining the traditional course into the Outward Bound aid station. The May Queen aid station, for decades the first and last major checkpoint of the race, is gone from the course entirely, replaced by new sections at Carter Summit and the Turquoise Lake Dam. Race organisers say the redesign keeps the distance at roughly 100 miles while steering the field well clear of the burn area.
What has not changed is the essential character of the race. The course still climbs more than 15,000 feet, never drops below 9,200 feet of elevation, and still turns at the top of Hope Pass — 12,600 feet up, crossed twice, with the outbound and inbound ascents coming either side of the Winfield turnaround. The 30-hour cutoff for a finisher's buckle remains, as does the brutal arithmetic that typically sees only around half the starters make it back to Leadville. A forecast high of 24C in town looks benign, but an 88 per cent chance of afternoon precipitation raises the familiar spectre of storms on the high passes.
The race lands in the middle of the densest fortnight of the ultrarunning season. It is a week since champions were crowned at the Waldo 100K and the rest of August's opening weekend of ultras, and the UTMB World Series Finals begin in Chamonix on Monday, with the sport's attention swinging to Mont Blanc for the week that follows. Leadville, as ever, occupies its own space in that calendar: less a championship than an institution, run at altitudes no European classic can match.
For the roughly 800 runners who started this morning, the redrawn course adds a layer of novelty to an event that trades on familiarity — split times against previous years will mean little around Turquoise Lake, and pacing plans built on the old Powerline return will need rewriting on the fly. The first finishers are expected back in Leadville late this evening; the final buckles will be earned when the 30-hour gun sounds on Sunday morning.