Rocky Mountain Highs

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In the San Juan mountains, high mountain scenery is not restricted to just the backwoods jeep drivers.

Regular roads cross territory almost as special.

Today is my turn on one of Colorado’s highest paved roads, Red Mountain Pass.





While the scenery is incredible, the drive can be scary.

Remember that snow line from yesterday?

Rain fell in Ouray throughout the night, so the line dropped elevation.

I’m almost certainly going to reach snow today.

Rocky Mountain snow requires a wholly different level of skill, one I’m not used to.

Regular drivers all carry tire chains to deal with it.

California in particular is known for chain controls, roadblocks where drivers without chains must turn around.

I have none.





The adventure begins right at city limits.

The roadway enters a series of tight switchbacks straight up a steep hill.

Some of these provide fantastic views of Ouray, sitting in its tight glacial valley.

At the top of the hill, the highway flattens out and passes through a tunnel.

The far side reveals a deep glacial gorge.

The walls are steep bare rock with pine trees growing in cracks.

The highway runs along a shelf blasted into the wall.

This highway has no guardrails!

They would be taken out by the avalanches that cross the road at least once every winter.

Bear Creek Falls

At a curve in the gorge, the road crosses a stream.

A parking lot sits just beyond it, with a scramble path heading down.

The path leads to Bear Creek Falls, where the stream cascades down the canyon wall.

The waterfall is long, so getting a good picture is pretty tough.





Past the waterfall, the gorge begins to widen out.

The sides are now covered in yellow aspens alternating with pines.

This continues until the road turns away from the river and climbs the valley wall on another series of switchbacks.

These end at a high mountain valley, Red Mountain Creek.

Beautiful golden hills line the sides with bare rocky peaks behind them, now covered in snow.

I’m getting close to the snow line.

The temperature has dropped noticeably too.

I kept the top down anyway 😊





The valley and views just roll on and on.

Endless seas of yellow aspens line the highway.

The peaks are glorious.

I still can’t escape the fact that the highway is rising throughout, and the snow is getting ever closer.

It starts appearing on the tops of the nearer hills, and then slowly gets lower.

Idarado Mine

At the far end of the valley, the roadway enters yet more switchbacks.

A sign for a view appears on the right.

Since every mile of this highway has a view, this had better be special.

The spur road ends at a parking lot near old mine buildings and huge piles of tailings.

It overlooks the only historic backcountry mine accessible from a paved road, the Idarado Mine.

The state is currently restoring the site.





Unfortunately, the road keeps climbing after the mine.

It enters a sea of pine trees whose tops are dusted with snow.

The snow covers more and more parts of them, until the trees become a winter wonderland.

While great to look at, this scene is worrying to drive.

I have reached the snow line, and it quickly appears on the side of the road.

Very little precipitation fell as snow here, so the amount is low, but it’s going to get worse quickly.

Red Mountain Pass

What saved my sanity is that only five minutes after reaching snow, the highway crested the pass.

The sign at the summit says it all: “Red Mountain Pass Elevation 11,018”.

This is the highest elevation I have ever driven, beating the bristlecone pine forest by five hundred feet and the Bighorn Mountains by almost two thousand.

It’s only three hundred feet below tree line.

The rock next to the highway really is red, from trace iron deposits.





Now heading down, the road reveals more views of snow covered peaks.

It reaches the top of a wide and deep valley, North Fork Mineral Creek.

The road drops into that valley through a long set of steep switchbacks.

None of these have guardrails either.

Pine trees turn into another sea of yellow aspen trees.

More snow covered peaks appear behind as the road slowly twists down.

Finally, it hits the floor of the valley.





On the floor, the highway follows the creek.

The scenery looks familiar by this point from two days ago, but it’s certainly not dull.

The valley then reaches the junction with Middle Fork Mineral Creek, another glorious pine covered gorge leading to high white peaks.

It ends at Ophir Pass, crossed by another of Colorado’s classic dirt tracks.

Some GPS units think this road is drivable in a normal vehicle when giving Telluride directions, a source of frustration to visitors and amusement to local residents.





Past the valley junction, the road reaches the Animas River.

This valley quickly leads upstream to another classic glacial cirque.

High snow covered peaks surround steep slopes covered in aspen trees.

The cirque contains another classic mining town, Silverton, with Victorian buildings and dirt streets.

It’s larger than Ouray.

For some reason, it’s also colder, even though it has lower elevation.

Silverton

Silverton was one of the last towns in Colorado to make significant income from mining.

They operated commercially until 1991.

Although prospectors first struck silver here, they made most of their money through less glamorous ores like tin and lead.

The silver strike was so large it gave the town its name; Silverton is short for “Silver by the ton”.

The town now survives on tourists, backcountry skiers, and lawyers visiting the county courthouse.





Like many western towns, this one contains a historic museum, the Silverton Historic Society Museum.

It’s local and quirky, like most of the type (see It Can Never Happen Here…And Already Has).

This one contains Silverton’s first telephone exchange, back when operators connected calls by moving wires.

It has a collection of stuffed birds.

It has the entire lobby of Silverton’s first post office, complete with stickers noting that stealing pens is theft of government property, a minor felony!

The museum has a wall of old high school sports jerseys; the ephemera go on and on.





The collection that puts this museum far ahead of its peers is the old mining equipment, the most complete in Colorado.

Much of it was donated by local mining companies.

The first room holds samples of every mineral mined in the local area, including silver.

They are organized by chemical composition.

Next to these sits a shelf of small ceramic figurines.

All of them are small troll like creatures holding mine equipment.

These are the tommy knockers, spirits that supposedly bring luck underground.

The tradition started with coal miners in Wales.





After this, the museum has room after room of equipment, over a century and a half of mining history.

Most of it was familiar from my tour in Lead (see Gold Fever).

This is a good thing, because the displays have few labels.

It starts with prospectors’ pans, picks, and drill pikes, leading to all sorts of air drills.

Candles sit next to dozens of types of carbide lamps.

One section covers safety gear with oxygen masks and first aid kits.





These rooms led to a section of things I did not see in Lead, buildings normally found aboveground.

One contained a full carpentry shop.

Their job was mainly cutting timbers to hold up the mine in soft spots like I saw at Gold Bug Mine.

Timber was normally carried into the mine on ore cars, but there was also a timber car with long hooks.

The museum has one.

The other main building holds a full blacksmith shop.

In the old days, tools broke regularly, and this shop repaired them all.

This museum was well worth seeing.

Million Dollar Highway

Past Silverton, the road becomes the Million Dollar Highway.

The source of this name is lost to western history.

One version states that the low grade ore used in construction was worth that much.

Another states that a million dollars worth of ore was shipped out in the year after the road opened.

These days, people may state the views are worth that much!





The rapid filled Animas River runs south from Silverton, but the canyon was way too narrow for a normal road (unlike the dirt tracks from yesterday!)

The highway climbs the mountain south of town.

Near the top of the switchbacks, it has a great view over Silverton and the valley.

It soon enters a familiar world of mountain meadows and pine forest, backed by more glorious snow covered peaks.

Many of the distant pine trees are snow covered.

With the snow dusting everything, it’s yet another view from a Colorado tourist brochure.

The road finally crests Molas Pass at 10,900 feet, only a hundred feet less than Red Mountain (but below the snow line!)





After the pass, the road enters another glorious high mountain valley, Mill Creek.

Steep slopes covered in yellow aspens rise beside the road, with snow covered mountains beyond.

A big gash appears on the right through the trees in places, the Animas Canyon.

As the valley continues on it gets deeper, with view after glorious view.

Slowly but unavoidably though, the big mountains fade away.

Now the view is filled with big hills covered in golden trees.

The hills then get steadily smaller.

Seemingly all at once, they disappear to reveal a wide river valley, where the roadway reaches the Animas River.

Not long afterward I’m back in the southwestern landscape I saw back in Cortez (see Old Traditions in a Modern World).





The roadway then passes through the largest town in the area, Durango.

It was founded to refine the ore from Silverton and other area mines.

These days it’s one of the mountain biking capitols of the state.

I didn’t have time to see any of it beyond the roadway.

South of town, the road climbs out of the Animas Valley with a great view of the town.

Afterwards, the land becomes completely flat.

Aztec Pueblo

The lack of scenery continued all the way to the San Juan River.

The area now holds sprawling desert cities that aren’t much to look at.

It’s worth visiting because the San Juan also attracted ancient inhabitants, ones very different from those at Mesa Verde.

The most important pueblo they left behind is called Aztec, in the city of the same name.

The pueblo is located on an obscure and unsigned side road, so get good directions before seeing this place (I had to ask at the local visitor’s center).





At first glance, the ruin doesn’t look very significant.

Obvious stone walls enclose a roughly rectangular space.

Unlike the pueblos of Mesa Verde, this one is above ground.

To fully appreciate this place, visitors need to know the history, which is described in a handout.

It has two versions, one from archeologists, and one from a Pueblo Indian who likely descended from the people who lived here.





A key to pueblo archeology is the style of masonry.

How are the blocks put together?

What do the doorways look like, and where are they located?

How were rooms arranged?

Every major group in the southwest had their own distinct style.

For this pueblo, certain rooms have doorways in the corners at a diagonal to the walls.

These are highly unusual, because they weaken the structural integrity of the wall.

They are also a dead giveaway that this pueblo was founded as a colony of one of the most important of all ancient pueblo societies, Chaco Canyon.

They founded a trading empire in the mid 800s that dominated the southwest for almost five hundred years.





The Park Service created a trail through the pueblo in the 1930s.

It enters through a recent doorway cut in an outside wall.

It’s a tight fit.

The rooms are small with low ceilings, creating a dark claustrophobic walk by modern standards.

They form a long chain, one after the other.

Air and some light come from little vents in the walls, plus the occasional door into the central plaza.

Excavations showed that all rooms were used for multiple purposes, except those specifically for storage.





The trail exits the pueblo into the central plaza.

This plaza was a ceremonial ground, community gathering place, and trading center.

Many of the exposed rooms off the plaza are now filled with dirt to prevent deterioration.

Some of the walls show the characteristic diagonal doorways.

Great Kiva

The floor of the plaza holds a few round depressions.

These look like the kivas of Mesa Verde, except that they are much larger.

They are Great Kivas , another feature of Chaco Canyon culture.

Each of these ceremonial rooms held entire families.

On the far side of the plaza archeologist Earl Morris reconstructed one of these kivas in 1934.

It’s the only one in the southwest.

People enter through a single door into a large round room dug into the earth.

The surrounding wall contains slots to let in light, but the room as a whole is very dark.

The roof is constructed of multiple layers of mud and branches.

Four central posts sitting on two large stone disks each hold up the roof.

The room center holds two rectangular depressions, surrounding a smaller one that held a fire.

The Pueblo Indian’s writeup states that the tribes would gather in this room for sacred ceremonies of spiritual renewal.





After Aztec, I got yet another of those surprises that separate a road trip from a regular vacation.

My original plan was to visit Chaco Canyon itself next, the most compelling Ancient Pueblo site in the entire southwest.

It’s located in high desert far from any town, and the only access is on dirt roads that become impassible during rainstorms.

Normally, this is never a problem because in the desert it rarely rains.

I checked the forecast for the next few days and discovered a veritable deluge heading this way!

I looked at the schedule and found things I could rearrange.





I ended up driving south to Gallup.

This sent me through Shiprock.

I finally saw the namesake peak south of town.

Like Devil’s Tower, it’s the core of a former volcano (see The Sacred Tower).

The Navajo consider it sacred and prohibit people from approaching any closer than the road.

Gallup

After Shiprock, I had a long drive south across the Navaho Nation on US 491.

Until a decade ago, this was US 666, the “Devil's Highway”.

It got the number because it was the sixth highway branching off the famous US 66 when highways were numbered here.

Whatever people believe about the devil connection, the highway accumulated a frightening history of accidents.

In the late 1980s, it had the highest rate of fatal accidents in the country.

The reasons vary depending on the person doing the analysis, from open range livestock to speeding trucks to people driving home drunk from Gallup (the Navajo Nation prohibits alcohol within its borders).

Thankfully, things have gotten much better; how much the renumbering caused this is up to the reader 😊





Long after dark, I arrived in Gallup.

Gallup was founded by the Santa Fe Railroad as a resupply depot for its trains.

Soon afterward, it became a huge trading center with the Navajo and other local tribes.

Supposedly over half of all southwestern crafts are sold in Gallup, and downtown is lined with stores.

During the heyday of US 66, the town became a famous stopping point, and the place was filled with classic motels.

Sadly, all of them have aged badly since the Interstate came through, and many have closed.

Most of those still open are flea pits, with some of the cheapest rates in the United States (under $20/night!)

It’s still worth driving old route 66 at night to see everything lit up in neon.





The modern tourist facilities are located near the Interstate exits.

They include nearly every chain restaurant known to man, dozens of chain motels, and uncountable fast food joints.

When arriving late, the last is a lifesaver, because everything else shuts down pretty early.





When staying in Gallup (whether old hotel or new), travelers need to be aware of the railroad.

It’s one of the busiest lines in the country, and trains run at all times day and night.

The noise echoes throughout town.

Only the most expensive hotels have sufficient sound proofing.

I have earplugs, and they were a lifesaver.

I ended up using a last minute hotel coupon to get a low end chain motel at the cheapest price I’ve paid all trip, and still slept beautifully.

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Photos

Road to Red Mountain Pass
The drive through the Uncompahgre Gorge south of Ouray. Note the lack of guardrails!

Ouray
View of Ouray from the road to Red Mountain Pass

Bear Creek Falls
Bear Creek Falls from the top

Red Mountain Creek
The valley of Red Mountain Creek, heading for Red Mountain Pass

Idarado Mine
The only backcountry mine site near a paved road in Colorado

Snow line
Reaching snow line close to Red Mountain Pass. Note the rock face on the right; the mountain really is red.

Mineral Creek valley
The highway is just as tough, and scenic heading down

Silverton's first telephone exchange
Who needs the kitchen sink when the San Juan Historic Society has stuff like this?

Tommy Knockers
The sprits that bring miners luck

Mine blacksmith shop
Part of the reconstructed mine blacksmith shop, which kept tools repaired

Silverton
Special view of Silverton from an overlook on the Million Dollar Highway

Molas Pass
Molas Pass on the Million Dollar Highway south of Silverton

Million Dollar View
Dropping into Mill Creek valley on the Million Dollar Highway

Aztec Pueblo
Part of the ruins of Aztec Pueblo

Great Kiva
Inside the reconstructed Great Kiva at Aztec Pueblo

Gallup route 66
Part of the famous neon-lined route 66 in Gallup New Mexico