Biking the 401–Crested Butte, Colorado and the Jewish Question

Ilana was eyeing a silk-print wrap-around skirt as a present for a friend when a retirement-age Jewish mom with an eastern accent started up a conversation with me. When you wear a kipah, everyone assumes you are Israeli.

We spent this morning at the summer arts fair in Crested Butte, Colorado, a town of 1,600 or so permanent residents that forms a half-moon of built-up area in the midst of a plain between high mountain ridges that still boast patches of snow at the beginning of August. Four hours from Denver, it’s not the kind of place you expect to find a Jewish community, but the woman told us that the local synagogue, the cleverly-named Bnai Butte, counts 60 families among its members. If you add to that the Jews for whom Bnai Butte is the shul they refuse to enter, we must be one of the town’s leading denominations and ethnic groups.

Like other minorities, Jews in outlying places either form insular groups or try to beat the locals at their own native culture. The latter was most evident over our weekend in Crested Butte. A dark-complexioned, kinky-haired young mountain biker wearing devil-blue Duke duds (that’s my alma mater) eyed my tzitziot and smiled a greeting as he passed by me on the street on Shabbat, and a heavily tatooed, long-haired country banjo man called out “Shalom” from his street-musician perch.

The high point of the long weekend was the three-hour mountain-bike ride on the 401 trail, which my sister and brother-in-law tell me is considered one of Colorado’s classic bike routes. It begins with a long climb up a dirt road in the direction of Aspen. Then you turn off onto a 1-abreast trail through stands of aspen and stretches of cowparsnip as high as your shoulder, which give you the feeling of pedaling through a green and white sea. Patches of color come from pastel columbines, flame-orange fireweed, and indigo lupine. The steep ascents, which had me gasping for oxygen, gave way to a stead descent into a wetland valley lined with jagged peaks showing strata thrown every whichway by subterranean forces.

I asked my companions why the trail was named “401.” They didn’t know, but I fantasized about us coming on a signpost where a ranger was painting over the rightward digit with a large “2.” “Bear ate another biker,” he’d say.

We biked largely alone, only occasionally encountering another group of bikers, all of them large, blond, and Nordic-looking (and only one woman among them). On this weekend, the first of the month of Av, the Diaspora seems to have reached Crested Butte but stopped short of the 401. By next weekend, who knows?