Mesa Verde

We spent two nights at the Far View Lodge inside the Park, which made our sightseeing easier and gave us a little more time to decompress - the drive in and out of the park is great, but winding and long. I didn't want to have to do it more than once each direction.  The Lodge was fine, although these Park concessionaire operations always leave a little to be desired. Ditto with the dining room and the cafeteria.

The highlight was the cliff dwellings, as it should be. We headed down early and signed up for back to back walking tours of both the Cliff Palace and Balcony House. Which were great. They require a little dexterity - big ladders and small openings - but nothing we couldn't handle.

Like the other ancient Pueblo sites, it's difficult not to be impressed by their age and what they say of southwestern culture almost 1000 years ago. But the cliff dwellings have their own aesthetic character, too, with their striking positions on the canyon walls.

Ouray

By mid-afternoon, we had gotten back to within 20 miles or so of where we had started that morning. Our circuitous route had been necessary, but nice - pretty classic Colorado, with the Black Canyon thrown in.

I first encountered Ouray on my grand 1976 walkabout, the day after I climbed Mount Elbert and just a few days after almost getting washed out of the Big Thompson Canyon (Estes Park: 2007). My last ride had dropped me in town and I walked up (it's a steep Main Street) to the switchbacks above town, where I spent hours watching cars and jeep tours pass by before finally crawling under trees somewhere to sleep. I was on the rode again early the next morning and I think I spent the next night along the Santa Fe mainline just outside Williams, Arizona.

Ouray, like all the other towns around it, was built on mining. Silver, mainly, and some of the other minerals often found in similar hydrothermally altered areas. The mountainsides are red as a result of the heavily oxidized minerals. The stream beds are stained red for the same reasons, though mining practices accentuate any natural tendency to rust. The ground beneath these mountains is riddled with small and large tunnels, at least one of which go all the way through to Telluride, the next valley west.

The road from Ouray over the top to Silverton is impressive (and expensive enough to be called the million dollar highway - although that would only buy a few thousand feet of guardrail in today's dollars). As noted, the roads I really wanted to take were the jeep roads back to Lake City or up above Telluride -- maybe another trip with more time and on a tour where someone else drives.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

It's only 15 miles or so in a straight line from Lake City over to Ouray and Silverton. A little bit farther if you drive your ATV over Engineer or Cinnamon Pass. But much farther if you have to drive around by way of Montrose, which we did. On the other hand, the drive down the Lake Fork was beautiful and despite some concerned looks from my copilot, took the Blue Mesa cutoff over to US 50. It probably saved some miles; it may have saved some time.

Taking the long way around gave us an excuse to visit the Black Canyon - not that we should have needed one. The best thing about this canyon is that it really looks like what a canyon should look like. Deep, vertical, sort of scary. And the rocks are beautiful, too.

Lake City

Lake City is tucked into a deep valley a long way from pretty much anything. We arrived on Monday evening, at the end of the Labor Day weekend, and were warned that the hordes from the previous days might have eaten most of the food in town. We ended up at the Cannibal Grill and finding food didn't seem to be a problem.

The drive from Taos had been very pretty, but long, including both Wolf Creek and Slumgullion Passes. Coffee for me in Pagosa Springs. A quick drive-by tour of Creede. And some great views of the uppermost reaches of the Rio Grande Valley.

We stayed at the North Face Lodge - the layout of a motel, but the trappings of a lodge. I felt it would have been particularly convenient if we could have parked our dirt bikes or our jeeps right outside the door. The bakery, just down the hill, was exactly what we needed the next morning. Although there were signs warning of bears, there was nothing about not feeding the dog. The very patient and ultimately successful dog.

This spring, I had wondered if there might be a scenic short-cut from Lake City over to Ouray and Silverton - a short distance as the crow flies - but found that although there were roads, they were for real off-road vehicles, not tourists in Outbacks. So the next day we took the long way around.

Cumbres & Toltec

We could have done the bus-train combination in either direction, but for some reason (likely the direction of travel and light and time of day), I had booked us to begin with the bus from Antonito CO to Chama NM and then returning to Antonito on the train. The bus leg was a beautiful drive (and only a few of us on the bus, so all in front rows chatting with the driver and enjoying the scenery).

The 60+ mile train trip back from Chama was wonderful and took much longer - the whole trip takes all day. Lunch is served cafeteria-style in Osier, where the eastbound and westbound trains meet - and resembled a more civilized version of powerful childhood images I had from old train books showing people piling off trains into crowded lunch rooms. We had opted for the intermediate level of service - the tourist car - which seemed to have been a good choice. Comfortable seating, free soft drinks and snacks, and easy access to the open gondola car.

The Cumbres & Toltec was built in 1880 as an extension to the Denver and Rio Grande. The narrow gauge line runs up and over Cumbres Pass from Chama and then follows the Los Pinos River and Toltec Canyon as it winds its way back down to Antonito, zigzagging back and forth across the CO-NM line.

It's remarkable that a small organization can successfully maintain such complex equipment and so much right of way. I guess they are regulated just as any other railroad, so are subject to much of the same oversight that major carriers are.

Pikes Peak

Note to self: next trip to the Rockies, don't schedule a quick trip to 14,000' on the first full day. In planning the trip, my main concern had been whether to drive up Pikes Peak or to reserve seats on the cog railway. The latter turned out to be a great way to do the trip. We dodged a few rain clouds and although the top wasn't completely clear, we could see back down to the prairies (not all the way to Kansas, nor west to the next major ranges). We heard some rolling thunder and saw some rain drops, but not much.

M did okay on the excursion itself, but spent the next several days fatigued and a little out of sorts, pretty likely an altitude response. I will know better next time.

I found the railway impressive and fun. It was a pretty crazy place to build it and amazing to think they run it year round. Must be because the weather is so much tamer here than on Mount Washington!

Pikes Peak is only 30th on the list of more than 50 peaks in Colorado between 14,000 and 14,500'. It's amazing how so many mountains can all rise to such a similar height. Geology - uplift history, isostasy, and glacial erosion have all been invoked (some problems with each explanation, although I guess the latter seems to have gotten the most attention recently). What's even more remarkable is that the other two highest peaks in the continental U.S., Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada and Mount Rainier in the Cascades, also are in the same basic range, despite completely different geologic histories and locations.

Garden of the Gods

We made it to the front range late on the second day out of Wisconsin. From Lincoln and North Platte (previous post), we followed I-80 and I-76 all the way to Denver, had a nice dinner in the rapidly upscaling RiNo (River North) District along Larimer, then tried to keep up with heavy 80 mph traffic on the curvy Interstate south to Colorado Springs. We had booked two days to catch our breath. Quite literally. Although in my following post I will admit to not really thinking this through very well.

Early Wednesday morning (we had been in Madison just Monday morning), I drove up to the empty visitor's center parking lot and unloaded my bike. The road up through Garden of the Gods includes a pair of rolling, smoothly paved, one-way loops that top out around 6500'.  What a beautiful, albeit oxygen-deficient, ride! I came back with M a couple of hours later. We mainly drove, and limited our walk to a fairly level one.

When the modern Rockies were forced upward (during the Laramide Orogeny), the Permian Lyons Sandstone was bent up and over the top of the older rocks underneath - like the precambrian granite that makes up Pikes Peak. The erosional remnants of these steeply tilted pink sand dunes are found up and down the front range.

Besides the Garden of the Gods, our trip also included Pikes Peak (next post). We did a neat loop up Gold Camp road and down North Cheyenne Canyon. We saw a little of older, downtown Colorado Springs, including Colorado College and the beautiful residential neighborhoods around it. And we had a great dinner at Shuga's. But much of what we saw was very generic strip malls and subdivisions sprawling up the hillsides around town.

Colorado Springs hosts a large collection of religious institutions (not just churches, but missionary organizations, Christian publishers, and other examples of corporate protestantism). I suspect that when the rapture comes, the angels may not waste much time trying to extract these folks from their gated communities.

Sand Creek

I think I first read about Sand Creek back in the 1970s. I suspect I was already pretty sensitive to Native American views about the influx of illegal immigrants carrying guns and small pox, but there was something about the Sand Creek story was particularly graphic and tragic.

Long story short, in November 1864, U.S. troops arrived to rout out an Indian encampment and despite previous commitments and truce flags, they brutally massacred men, women, and children, then returned to destroy and plunder the village and mutilate the dead.  The massacre at Sand Creek rallied many indians to their final, ultimately unsuccessful, effort at resistance to expansion, but was also sufficiently egregious enough to be acknowledged and condemned by U.S. authorities.

Sand Creek was only recognized as a National Historic Site in 2007. Last year, the site marked the 150th Anniversary of the event.

I was lucky to pull in just before 4 in the afternoon and the rangers let me look around before they closed the gate for the day.

I lived in Denver and Fort Morgan in the early 1980s and wondered about visiting the site, but never got there. I do vaguely recall a well-logging job somewhere near here in early 1983.

Great Sand Dunes

When I first stuck pins into the David Imus map of the U.S. above my desk in Seattle, I imagined US 50 with various side trips. But I didn't consider Great Sand Dunes. I guess the notion of going practically to New Mexico on a drive from Seattle to Minneapolis just seemed a little too out of the way. But I woke in Salida to perfect weather and couldn't see any good reason not to.

The drive down the San Luis Valley west of the Sangre de Christos was beautiful. I didn't spend much time at Great Sand Dunes, but I did wander down to Medona Creek, checked out the Visitor's Center, and surprise, took a lot of pictures. I thought about hoofing it over the wide creek and up the nearest dunes, but I knew that would take a lot longer than it looked.  Not that I didn't need the exercise.

The creek was running fast through shifting sand bars, full of children rafting on colorful floaties, but apparently the stream is pretty seasonal and probably looks very different by the end of the summer.

Crested Butte

I was back on US 50 southeast of Grand Junction, but turned east at Delta, and drove up into the mountains south of Grand Mesa. This was a beautiful way to shift gears from the desert to the Rockies.

Gunnison County 12 climbs from the Paonia Reservoir up and over Kebler Pass and down the back way into Crested Butte. It provided nice views of the south side of the Elk Mountains (Aspen and Snowmass are on the other side), aspen groves, and small streams interrupted by countless beaver dams.

Crested Butte was the typical contrast of an older town (but with fancy shops and good coffee) and a newer sections geared more toward the winter ski crowds). I refueled with a good latte from Camp Four and headed south to Gunnison and then east over the Continental Divide at 11,312' Monarch Pass and into the Mississippi watershed.