For most of its 15 years, especially since 2012, two years after the race gained UCI status, the Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah has relied on the penultimate stage to Snowbird Resort for its `queen` stage to help decide the overall winner. When you add Powder Mountain to the stage mix, however, things change quickly. Organisers this year nixed the traditional queen stage to Snowbird and instead are starting the race there with a prologue time trial, once again ceding what will likely be the most important general classification stage to the mountain-top ski area about 85km north of Salt Lake City. Since 2010, the Powder Mountain climb has featured in the race just once, in 2014 when Tom Danielson, racing for Garmin-Sharp, won the stage by 57 seconds over BMC Racing`s Ben Hermans and Lampre-Merida`s Chris Horner. Danielson went on to win the overall by nearly the same margin. The next year, however, Danielson announced on the eve of the Tour of Utah that he had tested positive for synthetic testosterone a month earlier.ADVERTISEMENT `Powder Mountain is probably the hardest climb in North America with a mountain-top finish, and essentially every day after that is hard,` said Elevate-KHS rider James Piccoli. `Eric [Young] and I went to see the Powder Mountain stage a couple of days ago, and while we were there a car that was driving up the mountain literally exploded on the side of the road from overheating,` he said. `The radiator just blew up. So that gives you an idea of the kind of road we`re racing on.` Stage 2 starts in Brigham City and takes the peloton over 135.8km to the top of the daunting climb. Organisers have added an extra challenge this year, taking the route another 3km past Powder Mountain`s `Skylodge` where the race finished in 2014, ending the day on a gravel road.
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