Runners get the chance to run through a piece of Rocky Mountain history at Arvada’s All-Out Summer Breeze Half Marathon, which is set to make its 12th annual running in summer this year and joins a 10K and 5K race that were run for the first time in 2012.
It was here that the first gold discovery in the history of the Rocky Mountain region took place back in 1850 — almost to the day of the race, back on June 22, 1850, in fact — when a Georgia man named Lewis Ralston dropped his sluice pan in the fast-flowing Clear Creek and found about a quarter of an ounce of gold, then worth about $5 (today it would be worth more than $300).
Ralston returned in the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1858, which would lure more than 100,000 prospectors into the Rocky Mountains in search of gold.
The Summer Breeze Half will take runners along the trail where many of those prospectors once scoured the region for gold, along the 1.5-mile-long Van Bibber Creek Trail, today a 10-ft.-wide walking, running and biking trail that stretches between the Stenger Soccer Complex just off West 58th Avenue and the Van Bibber Open Space, a 133-acre park with plentiful wetlands and grasslands.
The course makes two laps along the Van Bibber Trail, heading west out through the parks and open space areas all the way to Indiana Street, where runners turn left and head south down to the turnaround point at West 52nd Avenue and Howell Street.
Once there, they turn around and head back in the opposite direction along the route they’ve just run, all the way back to the Stenger Soccer Complex.
There, they’ll make a second turnaround and repeat the course a second time, all the way west and south along the Van Bibber Trail and back again.