Who knew air could be so brutal? The burning, biting, muscle-clenching power of it.
As a trail runner who gravitates towards training in regions of relatively clean air, I rarely question the invisible fuel that oxygenates my muscles. But in February, as I stomp through the teetering peaks of the San Juan Mountains in Colorado at 2800 metres above sea level, I am meeting its suffocating and savage dual personalities.
I’m in the remote mountain town of Silverton in Colorado, on an anticlockwise road trip through America’s most adventurous and outdoor-oriented state. This is an Old West frontier town that was once the epicentre of Colorado’s silver mining boom in the late 1800s. Fortunes were found and scuttled among the peaks between here and the larger centre of Durango, about an hour’s drive to the south.
The town by rights should have become a ghost town when the mining boom ended in the early 20th Century. But today, a stubborn population of trail
