The Leadville Trail 100 MTB will run on a revised 101-mile course this weekend after the Willow Fire forced organizers to change the route. The new layout keeps the race’s centerpiece climb to Columbine, but it drops the old Powerline finale and trims the kind of climbing that has long made Leadville a grind from the first mile to the last.
That matters now because the 32nd edition is landing on a course that looks familiar in broad strokes — 100 miles out and back, with just under two miles of singletrack — yet races very differently on paper. The route still rises to over 12,500 feet at Columbine, but it now totals 9,897 feet of climbing, down from more than 14,000 feet in previous editions, after the Forest Service closed key sections including Powerline, Hagerman Pass Road and Sugarloaf Mountain.
The men’s race still has the same reference point: Keegan Swenson, who has won five times in a row and will wear the rainbow bands from last year’s marathon MTB Worlds victory. Quinn Simmons is expected to challenge him, but the course change could alter how that contest unfolds. A finish without the old Powerline sting tends to give stronger riders a little more room to regroup before the line, and that can make it harder for one move to stay decisive all the way home.
For the women, the field is equally loaded. Melisa Rollins, who won in 2024, is back after returning to form this summer following a spring of injury. Kate Courtney, last year’s winner and course-record setter, is no longer focused on this event after signing with FDJ United-Suez and turning to road racing. Sofia Gomez-Villafañe, who won in 2023, and Hannah Otto, the 2022 winner, add more depth, while Anna Gibson arrives after representing the US in Skimo at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Leadville has always rewarded patience more than spectacle. The race climbs at altitude, spends most of its day on long sustained grades and only asks riders to solve a small amount of technical terrain. This version still does that, but in a softer way: more flat sections around Turquoise Lake replace the old punch of Powerline, and 6,100 feet of the climbing now comes in the first half alone. That leaves Columbine — 7 miles long and averaging 8 percent — as the place where the race can still break open.
The question on the new course is not whether it is still hard. It is whether it is hard in the same way. The missing climbs make this edition less brutal than past Leadville races, but they also create more chances for larger groups to stay together into the final miles. If that happens, the finish could depend less on a single explosive move and more on who still has enough left after Columbine to handle the fast return to town.
This weekend will show whether the revised route produces a more compact race or simply shifts the decisive moment somewhere else. Either way, the old certainty is gone: Leadville is still Leadville, but the course that has decided so many races before is not the one the riders will face now.
