Vail and Steamboat Springs

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Our second day in Frisco we headed out to see Vail and Steamboat springs. They are popular well known ski resorts and the playgrounds of the rich and famous. Vail is very compact and crowded with the center of the village closed to traffic. It was very quiet because it's autumn so the summer crowds have gone and the winter snow and skiers have not yet arrived. There was a huge amount of building going on. It was hard to imagine that they could squeeze any more condos into such a small space but it was happening. I walked around the village for a short time and then we drove on to Steamboat Springs. The town derived it's name from the hot springs in the areas which sounded like a steamboat to early settlers. It's larger and more spread out than Vail and seemed more of a residential town rather than a ski resort.
It was quite a long drive from Vail to Steamboat through a variety of landscapes, some forest, some desert, some rocky areas but a nice trip. On the return trip we took a side county road 11 which was dirt and not the best maintained road but a very scenic little route. It provided lots of great opportunities.
CR 11 took us eventually to the main road back to Frisco. On that road, we came across an bad auto accident which seemed to have occurred not long before we reached it. It had been a head on collision involving two cars. One car was turned over in the ditch and the other remained in the middle of the road. Because of the location of the accident, there was no cell phone service available and no way of getting help. Fortunately, I have ONSTAR in my car which is satellite tracked and has an emergency call option available. I called the ONSTAR 911 and emergency help was dispatched. There were plenty of people at the scene to help, so after the call we traveled on back to Frisco.

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