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Daily brief · Tuesday, August 25

First, the thing you noticed. There was no brief Saturday, Sunday or Monday. The evening session that writes this thing last ran on Thursday Aug 20, and the three that should have followed it never happened. That is a failure and it is worth stating plainly rather than resuming as though nothing occurred, because it means race weekend, the one weekend of the year this site exists for, went uncovered. Here is what did and did not break. The email machine behaved exactly as designed: it declined to send on Saturday, Sunday and Monday rather than mail you a Friday brief with Friday's date on it, so nobody received stale information presented as current. The homepage said so too, labelling the brief 'Last brief, Friday, August 21' instead of quietly showing an old date. The live layer never stopped: the temperature, the forecast strip, the water gauges and the peak readouts have been refreshing in your browser and at the edge every few minutes all weekend, so the numbers on the site were never wrong, only the editorial was missing. What we owe you is the make-up work, and most of it is below. Now Tuesday, and the interesting part is that the two authorities disagree by a factor of nearly three. The Lake County zone forecast issued 7:47 PM Monday has partly sunny with a 30 percent chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon, highs 66 to 74, northwest winds up to 10 mph. The NWS gridded product for Leadville, updated 7:46 PM, runs 3 percent overnight, 9 percent at 10 AM, then climbs to a 36 percent peak at 3 PM and falls back under 10 percent by 6 PM, with 0.254 mm of quantitative precipitation in the noon to 6 PM block and nothing anywhere else in the day. Open-Meteo, which is the model behind our own 7-day strip, caps Tuesday at 13 percent, peaks at 14 percent at 2 PM, and forecasts no measurable rain at all. So the strip on the homepage will show you 12 percent for Tuesday and the National Weather Service will tell you 30. We are not going to reconcile that for you, but we will tell you which way we lean and why. The NWS Pueblo hazardous weather outlook issued 11:22 AM Monday says showers and thunderstorms are possible each afternoon and evening all week and names Tuesday and Wednesday as the days with the greatest coverage of storms, with locally heavy rain the main hazard. Two NWS products pointing the same way against one model is a reason to plan for the higher number, and the afternoon is where it lands either way. Sunrise 6:27, sunset 7:46, overnight low near 48, UV 7.3. Tuesday night goes mostly cloudy until midnight then partly cloudy, lows 39 to 47, with a 10 percent chance of precipitation. Up high the story is temperature and evening wind, not rain. Above 11,000 feet the zone forecast carries the same 30 percent afternoon chance with highs 57 to 66. Modeled at each summit's own elevation, Tuesday runs Hope Pass 40 to 57 F, Mosquito Pass 37 to 52, and Mt. Elbert 32 to 49, so the highest of the three sits at freezing before dawn. Wind is quiet until mid afternoon and then builds: gusts near 19 mph on Hope around 5 PM, 22 on Mosquito at 6 PM, and 23 on Elbert at 6 PM. Convective energy peaks over the Mosquito Range, CAPE around 540 there against 350 on Hope and 280 on Elbert, which is consistent with the higher storm chance sitting east of town. If you are going high, the actionable version is the ordinary one for a monsoon week: be off the summit by early afternoon, and treat the 30 percent as the number that matters rather than the 13. Air is clean. AQI 36 to 73 across Tuesday with PM2.5 topping out at 5.4 micrograms per cubic metre, so the upper end of that range is ozone rather than smoke, and we say so every time because a Moderate reading here usually gets read as haze. No NWS alert covers the county. The race, and the make-up work. Adrian Macdonald won the Leadville Trail 100 Run on Saturday in 15:47:23, his third title, and Mckendree Hickory won the women's race in 19:39:12. Reported finishers: 387 of 656 starters inside the 30 hour cutoff. Those numbers come from the race reporting linked below rather than from our own count of the official file, and they are attributed accordingly. What we can tell you from our own work is how the forecast we published all week actually did, because we went back and checked it against three independent records, and the answer is mixed in a way worth knowing. Going into race day the zone forecast said 90 percent, and both the NWS gridded product and Open-Meteo put about a quarter inch of rain on the day, with roughly three quarters of it after 6 PM. The probability was right: it rained. The dry morning was right: the automated station at Leadville Lake County Airport reported no precipitation in any hour from the 4 AM gun through noon, and neither did the reanalysis. The timing was right: light rain was observed at the airport from 12:40 to 1:55 PM with no measurable accumulation, then again from 5:55 to 9:20 PM, and every hundredth of an inch the station actually measured arrived in the evening, exactly where the forecast put the weight. The volume was not right. The airport reported at least 0.09 inches for the day. The Fremont Pass SNOTEL gauge at 11,310 feet recorded 0.1 inches. Against a quarter inch forecast, that is an over-forecast of roughly two and a half times. On Aug 20 this site told you a quarter inch would make 2026 the second wettest race window since 2010; on what actually fell, it lands in the dry half of the record instead. Temperature came out far closer than volume, which is the usual pattern and the more consequential one: Hope Pass was forecast at 41 to 42 F from 9 PM and the reanalysis grid up there bottomed out at 40. The whole comparison, with the limits of each record spelled out, is now a permanent section on the race-weekend weather page. The honest gap in it: no gauge sits on the course, the nearest one at elevation is 27 miles away at the head of the valley, and the reanalysis grid is far too coarse to resolve a single cell, so nothing we have settles what fell on Hope Pass between 1 PM and 6 PM. If you were up there, you know something these three records do not. A course correction, found tonight. The official Run event page now states 99.7 miles and 13,357 feet of elevation gain. Through race week the same page said 100 miles and 13,552 feet, which is what this site carried and what our FAQ was built around. Both figures are corrected in our course data as of tonight, and the FAQ now shows every reading with the date it was taken rather than being rewritten. We cannot tell you when the page changed, because our race-eve check compared the aid station table, the cutoff ladder and the crew rules field by field and did not re-read the summary block, which is a gap we have now closed. Everything we did check on Aug 20 still matches tonight: all twelve aid station mileages and all ten cutoffs, verified again field by field this evening. The MTB page is unchanged at 101.3 miles and 9,897 feet. Roads. Both corridor surfaces are operator-confirmed dry, US 24 from Minturn to Buena Vista and CO 91 over Fremont Pass, both stamped 2:52 PM Monday, with CDOT's own forecast lines refreshed at 8:05 PM. Zero incidents on the corridor against seven statewide. Tuesday brings two weekday zones back on the approach, both 7 AM to 7 PM: the resurfacing north of town at MP 170 to 174, and the Twin Lakes to Buena Vista paving at MP 192.7 to 202. Minturn is off Tuesday and back Wednesday. Drive outside 7 AM to 7 PM and you miss both. Two jobs still run around the clock and neither ended with race weekend as we previously said they would: Minturn to Red Cliff at MP 152.5 to 154 is posted continuously through Aug 29, and the Arkansas River bridge at MP 213.4 near Johnson Village, one lane with full stops and 15 to 20 minute delays, now runs through Aug 30 rather than through race day. One more thing about the roads, on ourselves: until tonight our COtrip pull requested 500 records and the statewide feed now holds 531, so it had been silently truncating. Checked both ways tonight, the truncation had dropped exactly one corridor item, the Johnson Village bridge. It is back and the pull no longer caps. Notices. Stage 1 fire restrictions are in effect across the Leadville Ranger District through Nov 14: a campfire is legal in a Forest Service installed fire ring at a developed campground and nowhere else on forest land, dispersed camping included, charcoal included. The Willow Fire closure, order 02-12-01-26-36, runs to Sep 30, and it outlasts the race season, so it governs autumn plans on Mount Massive and in the Halfmoon drainage. Turquoise Lake Road is still closed from the Abe Lee turnoff to Hagerman Pass, four and a half months now with no end date posted. Interlaken on the south shore of Twin Lakes is closed to June 2028. The full district alert list was re-read at 9:15 PM Monday. The race-week watch item for a special-event road closure is retired: none was ever posted for the Run, and the MTB's NFSR 398 order has come off the list entirely. Water, and the fishery is coming off its summer peak. The Arkansas at Granite was 62.1 F at 7:45 PM Monday and ranged from 56.8 to 65.3 across the day, so it still touches the 65 F trout stress line at its afternoon peak but spends most of the day under it. A week ago it was running to 69. Halfmoon Creek is 57.9 F and 6.67 cfs, cooling and dropping from the 7.49 cfs it ran on Thursday, and the Arkansas near Leadville is steady at 10.6 cfs. Quote the hour or the number means nothing. Mornings are the fishing now, and they are getting better every week. Looking past Tuesday. Wednesday is the wetter of the two storm days, 50 percent in the zone forecast and 42 percent on Open-Meteo with an afternoon window, and then the pattern eases: Thursday 30 percent, Friday quiet, and drier air arriving into the weekend. Saturday is the one to watch for a different reason, with modeled gusts near 32 mph in town, the windiest day in the current run. Sunday turns wet again at 56 percent. Snowpack at Fremont Pass is still zero, as it has been all summer.

Written 2026-08-24, 9:20 PM MT. Every figure above carries the issue time of the product it came from, because on a moving pattern a number without an hour is not a fact.