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A 50 mile trail run in the San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado, one counter-clockwise loop out of Lake City. Three climbs take it from 8,671 feet to 13,334, with fourteen miles on the Colorado Trail and Continental Divide Trail and seven creek crossings in Alpine Gulch before the first aid station. The clock runs 16 hours, from a 5 a.m. start to a 9 p.m. cutoff back at the town park. It is a benefit run: the money goes to Lake City's volunteer EMTs, to scholarships for graduating local students, and to other public service in the town.
The first running was on 17 June 1995, and it was called the Lake City 50. Snowfields on the Continental Divide stopped the proposed route that year and the course was cut to an out and back to Williams Creek, so the founders, Chip and Cathy Lee, moved race day to the third week of July. July had its own problems: the town was packed with tourists, rooms were hard to find and Lake City had no time for the race, and lightning on the Divide kept producing near misses. In 2002 the Lees handed the race to the Lake City community as a benefit for the town's EMTs, it was renamed the San Juan Solstice 50 Mile Benefit Run, and the date moved back to the solstice. Because the solstice falls on a different day each year, race day shifts between the Saturday before and the Saturday after it. In 2014 it landed on the solstice itself, about nine minutes after the moment of it. The 2019 and 2020 editions were cancelled.
11 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
+ 3 more.
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Nobody sees it until we have read it. No account, no sign-in.
Somebody watches it before it goes anywhere near this page. What we are after is footage of this course, on the ground. If it would be just as true of any other race, it is not this.
We want the address of the file the race publishes, not the file. We download it from there so the page can say where the line came from.
We read every one of these and we write back. Every fact here carries the source it came from, and the way a wrong one gets fixed is a person checking it against what you tell us.
Cutoffs move, races get postponed, lotteries open and close. We read the race's own sources and record where every fact came from. Put your email in and we will send you what changed, and where we read it.
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I keep this catalog because the information is scattered and hard to trust. Telling you when it moves is the same job.
