Red Mountain pass fall colors
We drove north on the “Million Dollar Highway”, so named because it supposedly cost one million dollars per mile to build in the 1920’s. We hoped to see some of the fall colors on the mountains, and we did at lower elevations. However, by the time we reached Silverton at 9300 feet, all the leaves have fallen.
We did enjoy the morning in Silverton, stopping at their historical museum. For a small town they have done a very credible job of covering the mining history of the area. Since today is Canadian Thanksgiving, we celebrated by eating lunch at “Thee Pitt’s Again”, which Enid had seen on the Food Network’s show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”. We were the only customers in the restaurant, just before noon, and had a pulled pork sandwich. There weren’t very many people in town, though when the tourist train from Durango arrived a few minutes after twelve, the population of the town probably doubled for the train’s two hour stop. The waitress in the restaurant told us that they would be shutting down for the season next Sunday.
After lunch we continued on to Ouray. This is the really spectacular part of the drive, or should I say, the really scary part of the drive. The road is narrow (in a couple of spots it actually has no shoulder at all as the right hand side of the road out over the canyon is falling away) and filled with hairpin turns of ten or fifteen mile per hour speed curves as the road crosses Red Mountain pass at 11,018 feet and then drops down to the tiny town of Ouray at 7792 feet in just a few miles. Most of the curves have no guard rails, and I think Enid did much of the trip with her eyes closed.
Ouray is a bit bigger than Silverton, but it too seems to be a town built on tourism. We had planned to swim in their hot springs, but it was a rather cool day without much sun, so we decided instead to just head back to Durango.