Leaving the low country and heading into the high country means sensory overload, pleasure, bliss, extreme exercise, danger, possibility of hypothermia, nudity, clinging to rocks with toes and fingertips and beer in the meadow with the afternoon sun.
We continue our trip to the San Juan Mountains, leaving Mesa Verde and heading around the loop back toward Durango the long way.
The Dolores River (in Spanish the “sorrow” River) flows out of the San Juan Mountains near Rico where its waters gather from snowpack clinging to the peaks around Lizard Head Pass. When you drive toward Lizard Head Pass from Dolores, you go through layers of vibrant red Colorado Plateau sandstones, ranging in age from 80 to 280 million years before the present. It boggles the mind to imagine all the changes over vast amounts of time that made this land what it is. Driving along in the beauty of red rocks with mountain vegetation rather than baking desert we can imagine the millions of years of shifting continents, eroding mountain ranges, ocean floors collecting debris from rivers dumping the excesses of eroding landscapes and time. Time and more time.
Most people look at the strata by the river as “pretty”. I look at them and have a feeling of insignificance. We am nothing in the passage of time. So we might as well boggle our minds looking at cliffs while we take a quick dip in the river and have a cold beer.
Driving up the Dolores River you feel you are in a secret place of sorts. This canyon has wide areas of floodplain where people spread out their stuff – houses and sheds and animals. Meanwhile the walls of the canon on the north faces are cloaked in some of the most stately aspen groves you’ll find and these will shower the deep red rocks with rain of gold in the fall. You can find several trailheads headed south as you go.
Rico is an old mining town full of aging hippies near the top of the pass. It has the most beautiful cemetery in the West. Just as you are approaching the town on the right you see graves among the aspen, spruce and fir. What a place to rest and wait for the mountains around you to erode away over the next few million years.
Rico is a splattering of a town with about 265 people living in mostly historic buildings left from the gold and silver rushes beginning in the 1860s. Some of the early miners here found that the Ute people were not too happy to have them visiting the Ute lands which had incorporated the La Plata and San Juan Mountains by treaty with the US until the big mineral strikes and US military action forced the Ute’s to abandon their homeland and move out into the desert to the south of the San Juan Mountains where they are today. The Utes, led by Chief Ouray, signed the Brunot Agreement in 1878 yielding the mountains to the hoards of miners that were swarming in.
Once you leave Rico you top Lizard Head Pass where volcanic formations dominate the landscape. Lizard Head is an obvious and unusual roughly 13,000 foot peak dominating the skyline to the north of the pass. This peak was named by miners who saw a likeness of a reptile head here but early in the last century a huge rock fall off the top of the peak destroyed the lizard head and now the peak looks like a sentinel. Its top is composed of volcanic ash (tuff) that is about 30 million years old.
Down we go toward Telluride. We pass through incredible precipitous canyons at Ames with overlooks where you can read about Mr. Tesla developing electricity transmission to serve the mines so they didn’t have to burn coal at the mines themselves. You can read about the narrow gauge railroad in the 1890s winding through these steep canyons to serve the mines that were everywhere. This was some of the most advanced railroading ever done in the United States given the sheer cliffs, steep slopes and high elevation. In those days it snowed huge amounts during the winter. (The early San Juan mining era coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution when humans would begin to burn fossil fuels at a rapid rate, releasing carbon into the atmosphere that had been tied up in rock formations for hundreds of millions of years. Today the atmosphere is so heavily polluted with our carbon emissions, the climate is rapidly warming, and the future of humanity and other life is in question.)
Over the hill you pass the road to Telluride Village to the right. Telluride Village is a community of multi million dollar houses built on the edges of the Telluride Ski Area. If you want to see some high dollar, mostly empty houses come on in. There is a good food store and you can catch the end of the Telluride Gondola down to Telluride for free. You can eat out.
Telluride itself is another mining town from the late 1800s. This was the core of the most prosperous mining in the San Juans with numerous huge mines in the mountains surrounding the town. The architecture reflects the era on Main Ave. with old storefronts and backstreets with older homes of Victorian architecture. These houses are beautiful and expensive. The town is beautiful, with its old buildings clustered together among a stunning backdrop of mountains. There is no more beautiful place anywhere.
And you can find really good food in Telluride from the old Baked in Telluride which dates back to the 1970s when the town was full of young baby boomers and the Grateful Dead played here and many people were enjoying LSD and illegal marijuana and skiing in the mountains around the town year round. There are many places to eat and unlike other nearby towns you can find high quality food cooked by top line chefs.
And the mountains surround the town more beautifully than perhaps anywhere else south of Glacier National Park in Montana. The sedimentary strata of orange and red stone support great masses of purple volcanic rock that rise up to high peaks in the many basins surrounding the Telluride Basin.
Many trails lead from Telluride including the Bear Creek and Bridal Veil Falls trails where you can walk for days if you want. Or you can ride the Telluride Gondola up to its first station and hike along the ridge and tie in to the Bear Creek Trail on the Wasatch Trail.
Telluride doesn’t allow unlicensed vehicles on its streets so you don’t have ATVs or other motor toys on the streets. People who drive such vehicles over Ophir Pass into Telluride have to truck their vehicles out and this seems to deter most of them.
The clientele in Telluride is unlike what you’ll see elsewhere except in Durango. Here you have ski bums and movie stars and wealthy people and tourists. The beauty, the expense, and the world class ski area bring in a unique crowd – white mostly and wealthy but largely liberal. One sense that a more diverse crowd would be welcome here… if they could afford it. But visiting is not expensive. I recommend drinking plenty of beer either on the patios or off in the woods next to town. We went in a back ally drank Rogue like bums.
Telluride has its own brewery that actively cans its beers and sells them around the region. Its obvious the people at Telluride Brewing are having a good time but frankly their beer needs some improvement. Their IPA has a harsh after taste and an uninteresting nose. More power to them. I’m sure they’ll improve the beer over time.
Be advised that he basins and forests around Telluride are full of wildflowers in the summer. The blue and white columbine, the monk’s hood, the geranium and on and on. You can lose yourself in the flowers if you look closely and really notice their details and delicate beauty. Stop and really feel the day. Connect your emotions directly to the beauty.
We left Telluride and drove toward Placerville. We got stuck in an hour long traffic stoppage caused by a huge downpour that caused the sandstone cliffs to flood red creeks down onto the road, unloading rocks and red mud onto the highway. Miles of debris clogged the road and the highway department was struggling to clean the road off and allow the weekend traffic to pass by. What a mess.
You pass through Ridgway which has a hot spring and some nice businesses.
We got to Ouray and holed up in our motel for the night. The atmosphere and the clientele in Ouray is strikingly different from Telluride. Here we have the Jeep/ATV crowd and most of them are overweight and not requiring very good food or very nice lodging. Ouray won’t allow people to drive their motor toys on the streets so its quiet, unlike Silverton.
Ouray has hot springs. There is a huge public pool hot spring near the north end of town and several of the motel/hotels have their own hot pools for you to use. Really great.
The best beer in town is Red Mountain Brewing. Very good and a nice place to get away from most of the southerners.
Ouray has less obvious hiking than Telluride does. We basically left and went up to Porphery Basin on Red Mountain Pass for another dose of wildflowers and serious climbing. Because of weather we turned around at 12,500 feet with the car at around 11,000. You have to just keep climbing and if you keep going you’ll get to some lakes in a wide basin and a place where the EPA cleaned up a mine that was draining orange acid water into the creek.
The rain started when we got to the car fortunately and we drove to Silverton (where ATVs abound on the town streets, filling the town with noise and overweight men in funny clothes). We went to the Avalanche beer place and ate surprisingly good pizza before going to Howardsville to hike again up the valley on the west side of the creek. This is a good place to look for plovers in the beaver pond edges and watch for warblers. Also find yourself some quartz crystals in the hundreds of millions of rocks by the trail.
From here it was back to the Rochester Hotel in Durango for fine beer and that feeling of being lost in time that you get in Durango if you lose yourself in the place and the architecture and mostly ignore the tourists. Life is about places and being present in places. Let the beauty of the wilderness wash over you.
