Durango

Ok, so some catch up is required.  The four days prior to our trip in the hills (breathlessly documented last time), we were in Durango, Colorado.  Its a bit of a holiday town, what with its access to various ski resorts, the San Juan Mountains and the Animas River flowing through it.

We did some obligatory rafting down the river, where we thrilled and entertained our American co-raftees with our British wit and charm.  I further impressed them with my uncanny efficiency for sunburn.

One of the main draws to Durango is its 1920s maintained narrow-gauge steam railway to nearby SIlverton, a largely-preserved mining town some 45 miles away. So we too thought we would take a journey up there, at about 12% the speed and about 100 times the cost of the car journey.  At least it is easy to gauge your carbon footprint when you take much of it home with you in your hair and clothes.

I jest. It is a rather spectacular -albeit it smoky and juddering- journey to Silverton, and we got some nice snaps. Cue picture splat:

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir übernachteten in Durango für vier Nächte und nahm einen Dampfbahnfahrt zu den nahe gelegenen Silverton. Der Zug war schmutzig und ineffizient und sehr undeutsch.

Donkey’s day of glory

We’ve got some other things to write about that we need to get though as we’ve spent the last five days in Colorado, but I wanted to write this one up while its still fresh in my increasingly unreliable mind.

Chan and I left Durango, Colorado this morning to make our way across to Colorado Springs, which is where we are now. En route, we popped into Silverton (remote and largely unchanged mining town – we’ll write about there later) to get some info from the visitor centre about the various scenic routes through and around the mountains in the direction we were going.  Ultimately we decided to take the Alpine Loop ‘scenic route’ through the hills.   It features several ‘ghost towns’ of previous mining settlements and some rather spectacular views.

Looks simple enough

Now, I’m no fan of the great white donkey we’ve been driving around these past few weeks, but it is notionally an off-road vehicle, so we thought we’d drive on up through Engineer Pass (a phrase historically not associated with me) and on to Lake City before re-joining civilisation on paved roads.  Just prior to Animas Forks, the signs recommend that you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle with high road clearance.  I figured our bullshit 4WD-SUV crossover wagon -designed for mounting the kerb next to the ATM and dropping off the kids on the hatch markings outside school - probably qualified.

Then we noticed what everyone else was driving:

 
Triumphant hard rock anthems playing in background

Versus:

Sad trombone plays

When we rounded the first couple of corners and saw the up-‘till-now dirt and rock road had turned into a series of greasy boulders and several thousand feet sheer drops, I admit it was squeaky bum time.  But to be fair to an otherwise boring and thoroughly abused nag (4100 miles and counting), it did really well. Evidently Jeep know how to do the off-road part, according to the otherwise toss reviews this vehicle gets. True, we got particularly familiar with the smell of burning clutch on the way up and similarly toasted brakes on the way down, but we got up there with aplomb.  Hurrah for the donkey!

Commence photo-dump:

         
We were looking down on snow. What is this madness? 


For reference: Ben Nevis is 4409 ft.

And today’s variety of roadside mammal that told me emphatically to fuck off was the Yellow-bellied Marmot.

 
“I will cut you”

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Heute gingen wir versehentlich ein Offroad mit einem ungeeigneten Fahrzeug. Ich ärgerte auch ein Murmeltier.

"It's only 40 miles away so we might as well take a detour"

Further to my last post in which I kept you all enraptured with my geekiness, I thought I would explain that we do know where we are sleeping each night (and most stops are more than one night) but we tend to decide en route any activities on the day we do them or sometimes the night before. The 500+ mile stints have caused us to lose a bit of perspective on distances, though. Somewhere that we have just read about in a pamphlet or been recommended by a local is suddenly "just down the road" when it is less than 50 miles away. Sometimes it has worked out:

Chimayo

This little place in New Mexico is apparently the "Lourdes of America". Chimayo has holy dirt which you rub on places that hurt and it gets fixed.  Not sure how I feel about charging $2 for holy water or $3.50 for holy dirt but I'm sure the chapel needed a new roof or something. It was very nice little place though. Very relaxing and on holy days they do reenactments which look very good if you are into that sort of thing. So if you are in the area it's worth popping in.  G says the espresso there was terrible and the coffee shop owner tried to sell him a wood carving for $4500.

Four Corners Monument.

So there is one place in the USA where 4 states meet (for those not familiar with the US check out a map and all the straight borders between states): The Four Corners Monument:

C - "We'll pop over to Four Corners for dinner."
G - "Why are we going again?"
C- "Well we can be in four states at once, there is a thing on the ground"
G- "And this is a thing that people do, is it?"

Well it certainly was a thing. It is situated on Navajo land and is a monument on the ground.

I do think it is quite cool. But not $5 per person cool and we didn't get a dinner either (the overpriced indian fry bread trailer was closed). But we were in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado all at the same time (but although it is the recognised monument, it is apparently 2000 ft out according to official surveyors).

So sometimes the result of these 80 mile detours is that I have to be quiet for at least 10 minutes whilst G has his Grumpy McGrump Grump face on.
 
(We had Pizza and then he was happy again.)