San Juan Backcountry

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Today, I got to experience some of the best of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and some of the worst.

It says something about the scenery around here that the latter had little effect on the former.





I woke up to pouring rain.

Not just any rain, the continuous sheets that only seem to appear in the spring and autumn.

The temperature has dropped too, so it was noticeably colder than yesterday.

The dirt streets have turned to mud, with water flowing in big ruts.

The rain and cold are a serious problem, because I booked a jeep tour today.

I ultimately went anyway, and it was still worth it.

San Juan Jeep Tour

Dirt tracks cover most of the Rocky Mountains.

Miners showed up in southwest Colorado looking for gold in the 1860s.

They found some.

They then built and blasted rough roads to reach their diggings.

After the mines closed, the roads remained, although they haven’t been maintained since.

For skilled backwoods drivers with 4X4s, they offer the easiest access to the most spectacular scenery in the region.

On top of that, they also pass abandoned mines, former stamp mills, and other artifacts of Colorado history.

For those without the right vehicle, they can be rented in Ouray.

I decided to take a guided tour instead, so I would know the history of what I’m seeing.

Given that the dirt tracks are currently potentially dangerous due to the rain, it proved to be a very good idea.





I did the tour with a company called, naturally, Switzerland of America.

Instead of a jeep, they do tours in a Dodge pickup truck with seats bolted to the back.

The seats have seatbelts, which passengers must use (anyone who thinks otherwise changes their mind after seeing the dirt tracks!).

With cold rain falling, the driver stretched a tarp over the back.

Rain still came in through the sides, so he also provided us with heavy duty raincoats.

The truck also had blankets to help people stay warn.

Ouray Ice Park

The truck headed out on the dirt road I drove to Box Canon Falls yesterday.

It quickly passed over a long and narrow gorge in the hillside.

A pipe runs next to the gorge, the city’s water supply.

The pipe has a number of leaks, including a nice big one close to the road bridge.

The water pours into the gorge, forming artificial waterfalls.

Every winter these leaks ice over.

About four decade ago, ice climbers started showing up to climb the ice in the ravine.

Local promoter Bill Whitt noticed them, and convinced the city to deliberately ice the ravine walls each winter.

Ouray Ice Park opened in 1991, and quickly became the premier ice climbing area in the United States.

Our guide pointed out the water nozzles that now create the ice.





Past the ravine, the road forked.

The left branch quickly twisted into a steep and narrow gorge, the one above the box canyon from yesterday.

The road remains in good enough condition to drive in a regular car with sufficient skill, but for one serious caveat.

The miners blasted this road directly into the ravine wall.

It is just wide enough for two trucks to pass each other.

When passing someone, the outer wheels will be less than an inch from either a frighteningly steep drop off or the gorge wall.

Anyone who cares to look up the ravine sees that parts of the road are held up with wooden boards behind metal pikes, repairs for landslides.

Other than that, the view is fantastic.

People are suddenly very thankful for the seatbelts.





At one point, the road reaches the “dead man’s curve”.

Like others with this name, it’s a tight semi-circle curve around a rock fin.

Our guide stopped here to point out the three memorials on the rock wall.

Unlike some of these curves, this one continues to kill people.

The most notorious recent example is a group of teenagers who came up here at night to shoot fireworks (which are illegal in Ouray) and drove right off the road.

Another pair of daredevils fell off the road in a luxury SUV; the airbags deployed and they survived, barely.

Camp Bird Mine

Farther up, the canyon finally spread out into a glacial valley.

The floor soon filled with aspen trees.

The sea of aspens and pines continued until we reached an overlook of a valley junction.

A big pile of dirt sits at the junction with pipes running through it.

This is our first gold mine, the Camp Bird Mine.

The pile is all mine tailings.

The pipes reroute local creeks around the tailings in an effort to keep them from polluting the water.

Camp Bird is one of the few technically active gold mines in Colorado.

The area has trace gold veins remaining, enough to make it a profitable mine if prices rise enough.

The current owners do just enough prospecting to keep the claim active, the reason the road is descent to this point.





Past the mine, our guide warned that the road was going to get significantly worse.

Immediately, it did, becoming more rocks and ruts than a traditional roadway.

Our ride is now quite bumpy.

Soon afterward, we passed a large Victorian house that looked really out of place in this wilderness.

The weather has done quite a bit of damage, with missing windows, rotting walls, and holes in the roof.

The house was built by original mine owner Thomas Walsh in the early 1900s so he could be close to his business.

It’s in such bad condition because the current owners of the mine refuse to either sell it or fix it.

In a few years the roof will collapse, and then it will just be a pile of old lumber.





After the house, our truck jolted and twisted over many rocks, climbing through one of the valleys.

Our driver warned people to put away all valuables, immediately before a nice two inch bounce over a flat boulder.

That was just the appetizer, as we entered another gorge.

First we forded a stream through wet rocks and mud.

Past that, the track entered open hillside.

The hillside is open thanks to rock slides.

At this point, the driver picked his way through going from boulder to boulder.

At one point, the path reached a big slanted rock exposed by erosion, and the truck slowly climbed up it.





All those rocks are the price for some classic high Rocky Mountain scenery.

The stream drops down the gorge floor through a series of waterfalls and cascades.

A carpet of brown plants, wildflowers that bloomed earlier in the year, cover all open areas that don’t have rocks.

Pine trees appear on the slopes further up.

The rain, instead of ruining the view, shrouded it all in atmospheric fog.

Yellow Rose Mine

At the top of the gorge, we reached a small mountain meadow surrounded by pines.

An unnamed waterfall slides down the slope on the far side.

This meadow holds the lower entrance to a gold mine that filled the entire mountainside, the Yellow Rose Mine.

The mine entrance has caved in, but other buildings survive.

One was a long wooden shack near the stream, all that is left of a boardinghouse.

Miners slept in this building, packed as tight as they would fit.

A huge pile of mine tailings fills one portion of the meadow.

People drive up here with picks looking for interesting rocks in the piles.

A number of those rocks held yellow flakes, but they are all pyrite (fools’ gold).





We forded the creek and continued up the mountain.

The track reached a steep rock shelf blasted directly into the side of a cliff.

Unlike the earlier stretch, this one was uneven and filled with little pebbles, a slippery nightmare.

Once the temperature at this altitude drops below freezing, this shelf quickly ices over.

Our driver hikes the shelf before driving it if it’s at all questionable.





Finally, we reached another mountain meadow.

This one was huge, with long views as far as the fog allowed.

This meadow sits directly at tree line.

Big rocky peaks form a wall on the far side.

The main mine operations were based here.

We saw a large timbered mine entrance with rails running from it.

Those rails went to a large concrete foundation, the remains of a huge stamp mill.

The entrance is closed off by a fence.

This one had holes in it, made by locals.

Our guide warned to stay within the visible portion of the shaft, because the mine has vertical shafts beyond where people have fallen and died.

Rock Glacier

After seeing the mine, we climbed to an overlook of the meadow.

Our guide took us here to see one of the rarest geologic phenomena in the Rocky Mountains.

From this vantage point, we saw what looked like an enormous pile of rocks flowing down the mountainside, stopping just above the mine.

The pile is quite distinct from the mountain surface, so it’s not a rockslide.

The pile is a rock glacier, an ice glacier covered in rocks.

Normally, snow in this area melts every summer, but the rocks reflect enough sunlight to have permanent ice underneath.

The glacier flows like any other glacier, slowly destroying what remains of the mine.

This is the most accessible rock glacier in the United States.





Just above the overlook appeared something that western residents are used to but I had never seen before.

In the east, weather is based on geography.

Whatever is happening in a particular place is almost certainly also happening at a close by place; a fact we use in travel planning.

In western mountains, it doesn’t work that way.

Elevation differences here are so large that the temperature drops enough to turn rain into snow and ice during spring and fall.

The elevation where this happens is called the snow line.

The snow line drops at night thanks to generally lower temperatures.

For us, the snow line appeared in the upper portion of the meadow, and the peaks beyond are covered in the stuff.





The road continues up beyond the meadow into the heart of the San Juan Mountains.

In warmer weather we would have had a glorious tour of rocky peaks above tree line, culminating in one of the highest areas in Colorado reachable by vehicle.

Unfortunately, the snow makes the road too dangerous to drive, so our guide turned around.

We went back to the valley junction near the Camp Bird mine, and took one of the other branches.





Soon afterward, our driver got to contend with another piece of ingenious civil engineering by gold prospectors.

They encountered a narrow canyon.

Unlike the ravine leading to Camp Bird, the walls here are completely vertical.

The miners blasted the rock from the side, creating a deep gouge halfway up the wall.

They then blasted the floor of this artificial groove to put through the track, effectively creating a tunnel with a missing wall.

It’s now called the shelf road.



Past the shelf road, we reached a flat area covered in aspen trees.

This grove is the location of one of Colorado’s ghost towns, Sneffels.

Notably, it contains no sign of this, not even cellar holes.

The town was established in the 1800s as a way station on the way to the mines.

People hauling supplies by horse had to stop around here at sunset.

The mine owners built a stage coach stop of wooden buildings.

Trucks replaced the horses in the 1920s, at which point the owners tore down the entire town and sold the buildings for scrap.

Yankee Boy Basin

Further up the stream, we entered a classic glacial valley, Yankee Boy Basin.

The area is named for one of the first prospectors to explore the region.

The first thing we saw was a large decaying building with huge wheels and pistons visible through the missing walls, the Atlas Mill.

This is the most complete abandoned stamp mill in Colorado (see Gold Country).

The mill remained intact because it operated until the 1950s.

During World War II, the American government needed all the scrap metal possible for armaments, and every abandoned mill in Colorado was salvaged.





After the stamp mill, we climbed the floor of the basin.

It became a classic glacial cirque, looking remarkably like Telluride, except that mountains are a little shorter and further away.

The upper part of the basin contains a two drop waterfall, Twin Falls.

The floor of the basin was absolutely covered in brown plants, former wildflowers.

In summer, this area becomes a flower feast and one of the most beautiful backwoods drives in Colorado.

During these periods, the road here is so busy that the dirt track can feel like a city street.





Yankee Boy Basin marked the end of the trip.

We headed back to Ouray afterward.

The road is just as nasty on the way down as going up.

I was on the side with the ravine drop off heading down, so it may be even nastier.

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Photos

Backwoods Jeep Ride
Backwoods jeep road heading for the Camp Bird Mine, outside Ouray

Deer in road
A deer in a road near Ouray, a not uncommon sight around here

Pipe waterfall
One of several waterfalls caused by leaks in Ouray's water supply pipe. When they ice over, the ravine becomes an ice climbing mecca

House in woods
Old Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, overlooking the Camp Bird Mine

Road to Yellow Rose
Rockslide filled ravine on the way to the Yellow Rose Mine. The road is the bare rocks on the upper right

Boarding house
All that remains of a boarding house that held dozens of miners. Note the pile of logs in the lower center.

Waterfall
Unnamed sliding falls above the Yellow Rose Mine

Mountain Meadow
Mountain meadow at treeline, with gold mine remains. Note the snow line in the middle of the picture.

Rock glacier
Rock glacier in the meadow, the most accessible in the United States

Shelf Road
The shelf road on the way to Yankee Boy Basin, shot from the hillside afterward

Atlas Mill
The Atlas Mill, the most complete abandoned stamp mill in Colorado

Yankee Boy Basin
Yankee Boy Basin, with Twin Falls on the lower left