Love on the San Juan Scenic Byway

Claire comes to visit Colorado!

For those that don’t know, my wonderful, amazing and beautiful better half, Claire and I have been living our lives apart since I moved out to Colorado to take a job as a wilderness therapy guide. Claire is sticking around in Vermont on her own adventure student teaching in an elementary school so she can get her certificate and find an awesome job as a teacher when she moves out to Durango this December!

An off shift for me is only six and a half days, so pack in the adventure we did. It seemed like we were together for weeks! We decided to spend the first few days in Durango, meeting up with all the other guides as per the weekly tuesday night tradition, checking out the town, swimming in the freezing waters at Baker’s Bridge, and camping up at Hermosa Creek, a free campsite on National Forest land.

    

It was time to make proper use of the adventuremobile at hand! We decided to do a loop around the San Juan Scenic Byway, hitting up all the exciting stops along the way. The Scenic Byway goes through some of Colorado’s most beautiful mountain ranges and mining towns. It also packs a punch with mountain passes at 11,000 feet in altitude and steep grades of up to 8%. Hard work for the little Ponty.

First stop was Mancos, the little Southwestern style rancher town where my company operates out of. The first thing on the docket was to get the brakes checked out before heading into the mountains (see previous post). Lucky for me, the partner of a guide I worked with is a mechanic. Matt took a look at the brakes and said that they look good to go! discovered a few other needs: Cap and rotor, sway bar link, lower radiator hose, and bleeding the brake lines. All pretty small upgrades that I’ll be doing next week. We also figured out that my house battery isn’t actually a deep cycle house battery, it’s just a car battery… and it’s dead. I’m now looking into a new battery and probably an isolator as it seems that it may be the culprit.

Back to the adventure.

We stopped at Absolute Bakery and Cafe, a recommendation from our roommate in Vermont who had randomly lived in Mancos. and then headed to Mesa Verde National Park.

What a cool place! After driving for 20-30 miles into the park and up to a massive mesa, the park opens up and there are ruins upon ruins of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. We see lots of little dwellings like these in our course area in Utah and I am blown away by them every time. It was amazing to see ones of this size where 60-80 people lived in a single cliff dwelling village. You can see in the following pictures entrances to old underground Kivas, where people would meet to hold council. Can you spot Ponty in the third picture?

  

    

Next stop was Rico Hot Springs, where a riverside geothermal aquifer that was accidentally tapped by miners in the 1970s was turned into a relaxing spa surrounded by beautiful mountains. We spent the night at Priest Lake, a sweet (and free) spot to park the camper just south of Telluride. I tried plugging the inverter into the not dead battery and Voila! movie night in the Ponty.

    

Eggs and bacon and off to Telluride. Telluride is a quaint, touristy ski town tucked in the mountains. Reminds me a lot of the little towns up in the Swiss Alps. We got our coffee fix and headed up to the Via Feratta, a cable traverse hundreds of feet off the ground along a cliff ledge (and right out on metal rungs on the exposed cliff in some places). This was well outside Claire’s comfort zone and she did amazing the whole time. What an accomplishment!

That night we made it to Ridgeway to the state park campground on the reservoir just in time to grab the very last of over 200 campsites. Got some ice cream to celebrate Claire’s high adrenaline triumphs and took advantage of a shower and a sink to clean our dishes.

The next morning we headed over Red Mountain Pass. The highest and steepest on the loop. Later on in the day would also bring Molas Pass and Coalbank Pass. Lots of ups and downs for Ponty.

Our first stop was Ouray, a tiny mining town (pop. 1,000) that came about with the discovery of gold and silver deep inside the San Juans. The town’s claim to fame is that once upon a time they boasted more horses and mules than people. These days Ouray is more known as a picturesque mountain town that offers tourists hot springs, jeep tours and some of the best ice climbing in the world.

We made some sandwiches and went to check out the Ouray Ice Park, a chasm that the town has turned into an ice climbers paradise. They pump water over the edges of the cliffs all up and down the canyon and built viewing platforms. They also host the Ouray Ice Bash where the top competitors in the world (including my old boss, Andrea) come to show off their skills. I didn’t snap any pictures of the Ice Park, but I got some of the adjacent river, where you can walk up into Ice Box Canyon to a pretty sweet waterfall.

    

A few more massive mountain passes and you make it to Silverton. Similar story to Ouray, Silverton is an old miner’s town that now has a population of 638. The mines are all closed down and the town mostly caters to tourists now. We learned some really cool history in the town about the transition from a miner’s sin city, with a red light district, saloons and gambling, to a more church going, family town as the mines moved closer in and the miners didn’t have to live in boarding houses at the mines. There’s a street in the middle of town that separated these two different worlds.

Claire and I were interested in learning more about the history of it all, so we decided to go on a mine tour. It was a bit of a cheesy, touristy thing, but it ended up being really interesting. We took a mine car 1/4 of a mile into the mountain where they had to blast through hard rock to get to the deposits of silver and gold. We learned about the insanely labor intensive process of drilling, blasting and removing the rock to send to the mills for processing. Plus, you gotta be honest, we look pretty good in those helmets and jackets.

    

Like I said, It was a pretty exciting, action-packed six days. We spent the next night at a free camping area on Lime Creek Road near the Purgatory Ski Area and then made our way back to Durango. We even had a little squirrel try to hitch a ride on the propane tank. We decided to stay in a hotel with tempurpedic beds before heading our separate ways again. Looking forward to December so we can once again reunite our adventures together into one!