Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Jun 17 – To Ridgway, Colorado

Today we moved from the desert of Cortez into the mountains.

The change was quite abrupt. All of a sudden, about 1/2 an hour north of Cortez, everything was green as we slowly climbed up a river valley.

IMG_2542

IMG_1019948

There was still a bit of red rock poking out every once in a while.

IMG_2508

We passed through the town of Rico which had some interesting old buildings.

IMG_2527

IMG_2528

Cortez is at about 6600 foot elevation. We slowly climbed up to Lizard Head Pass at 10,200 feet.

IMG_2520

Because it was such a gentle climb over a long distance it was not very hard on the RV.

IMG_2577

I think this is a new record high for the RV. I think our previous was just under 10,000 feet in Wyoming.

IMG_2565

Then we took a nose dive into the area around Telluride. I am glad I did not have to climb that. The picture below looks like we are climbing but it is a steep downhill.

IMG_2581

Notice all the large homes / chalets spread out on the far wall of the Telluride valley.

IMG_2586

We kept on going down until we made our turn east onto Highway 62. We got down to about 7000 feet.

IMG_2603

And then climb back up to around 9000 feet at the Dallas Divide.

IMG_1019956

Another steep downhill into Ridgeway.

IMG_1019959

We are staying in Ridgway State Park for seven days. There are two section with camping. The one we are in has full hookups but is just an open field. The other only has electrical but is in a much nicer setting on a hill over a reservoir. In hindsight I should have booked the other section as we can easily go a week with no water or sewer hookup.

IMG_1019963h

After we got setup and had lunch we headed into the town of Ouray to check out the visitor’s center. The Ouray area is called the Switzerland of America. It is in the valley beneath the mountain, below. We will get more pictures later.

IMG_2626

The area is 4 wheel drive heaven with all kinds of roads climbing up into different passes through the mountains. After talking to the guy at the visitor’s center, we may have arrived a bit too early. They had really heavy snow this year and a lot of the passes are still closed or require a full on Jeep to get through. We will try some of the easier ones.

On the way home we stopped at a fruit market that had a small health center business at the back of the building.

IMG_2627

2 comments:

  1. That's the exact route we biked a couple of years ago. The road down from Telluride was twisty fun, but the road down from the Dallas Divide was just pure white knuckled speed. Great area.

    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice RV camp site! We were in Yellowstone last weekend and the park service had just finished clearing the snow to access the observation deck. Lots of snow cap this year and many of the trail heads are still closed.

    ReplyDelete