Crazy to see World Tour riders hit your local mountains. A bunch of my friends rode up GMR to catch them going by, then finished the climb up Baldy for the finish. We made it to the top in our lowest gear, but plenty of people were walking the steep switchbacks on the final stretch to the ski resort. We watched the riders sprint the finish and make it look flat, all while what sounded like a WWE announcer commentated the whole thing. We watched the podiums, then realized the sprinters hadn’t even finished yet. The next day we went back to downtown Pasadena for a sprint finish and the final podiums, where Team Sky took the team victory.
May 20, 2017
About the race
This was the Amgen Tour of California, and catching it on Mt. Baldy was a real one — it doesn’t happen anymore. The race ran from 2006 to 2019, and the 2019 edition was its last. It went on ‘hiatus’ and never came back. So riding up Glendora Mountain Road to watch the peloton climb your home mountain is something you can’t replicate now, which makes it worth having done.
The climb itself is still there. GMR up to Baldy is a SoCal cycling rite of passage on any weekend — those final switchbacks to the lifts are just as steep with nobody racing.
