The next stop was at the eastern trailhead to Lead King Basin, which is less than a mile from the village/ghost town of Crystal. We're planning to drive the Lead King Basin, but know that there was an avalanche up there (uncertain of the exact location) and online reports were contradictory and left us uncertain whether the road is passible.
Our best course of action, in my opinion, was to drive into Crystal and ask about it, then proceed to the western trailhead.
If the road was indeed passible, we'd drive it, then drive back up the Devil's Punchbowl, then down into Crested Butte and return to the cabin in Almont. If not, then we'd likely be out of daylight (depending upon how far into Lead King Basin we traveled), so our alternate plan was to exit further west at Marble and drive the highway to Kebler Pass, then drop down to Crested Butte.
"No", "Yes", and "Maybe, the ATV's have been doing it!" were the three answers I got when I asked three people about it in Crystal. So, we had that going for us!
An interesting side note: we met a guy loading a KTM motorcycle on a carrier mounted to the back of a 4Runner. Turns out, that this was the bike that crashed over the edge on Devil's Punchbowl a week +/- prior, and was the "recovery in progress" for which we paused on the trail!
The man we met (Dave Phillips, aka Roads_End_Adventures on Instagram) told us that the owner/driver who crashed lives out of state, and had asked Dave via an online forum, to recover the motorcycle. Dave told us that the owner/driver had a helmet-camera recording when the incident occurred, but was waiting to make the video public until the bike was removed from the crash site.
Back to the story--we stopped at the
Crystal Mill then proceeded to the western trailhead of Lead King Basin. It wasn't long, maybe two miles, before we reached the avalanche site.
