Equipo Williams

I had never been to Colorado.  I had been looking forward to going to Colorado.  I love the mountains, I love hiking, and I love trains, and Colorado is rich in all three.

After Mesa Verde (in Colorado, and possessing mountains and hiking), we headed over to Durango.  We had rain on our second night in Mesa Verde, only our third night of rain during all our camping.  We found out that the end of summer and beginning of fall are Colorado’s “monsoon” season.  I’m used to monsoons of South East Asia and this wasn’t too bad but did make for less fun camping.  Durango was showing clear skies overnight and we found a nice campground just outside of town in the National Forest at Junction Creek.  We opened and dried out the tent and awning and enjoyed a quiet and beautiful night.

The next morning, we could hear the whistles of the Durango and Silverton locomotives on the early morning run out to Silverton.  This was my main reason for stopping in Durango: a preserved section of three-foot gauge Denver Rio Grande and Western track run as tourist train with old steam locomotives.  We had decided not to ride the train as it would have been an all-day trip and it would have been less exciting for the kids than for me.  We went to the depot and saw an excursion train leave the station under steam and then spent a few hours at the museum.  It’s a working railroad and they have a major maintenance facility which you can see into, but alas, not wander around in.

It took us a few days to drive from Durango to Denver, with stops in Ouray for hot springs and a couple of nights camping in National Forests.  We arrived in Ouray in a cold drizzle but were not deterred and spent the afternoon soaking in a 95-degree pool.  The following morning, we did a little bit of the Ouray Perimeter Trail which I enjoyed and Jessie and Audrey found to be a little vertigo inducing.

One of the campsites was at Hecla Junction on the Arkansas River.  This was just across the river from the old Tennessee Pass Line of the Denver & Rio Grande Western.  The line is no longer in use, but it would have been great to see in its heyday.  The relentless march of progress has an unfortunate way of making things more boring. It used to look like this but all we had was an idyllic campsite above the river.

It would have been nice to take this part of the journey more slowly, but we were starting to come up against a schedule for meeting friends and then making the dash back to the East Coast to get the car ready for shipping to South America.  We drove past many trailheads that we didn’t have time for.  Next time, Colorado, next time.

Coming into Denver we stopped at the Argo Tunnel and Gold Mill.  The focus is more on the milling and gold extraction than on mining which was pretty interesting (lots of hundred-year-old industrial equipment) and the kids got to learn how lucky they were to live in age of child labor protections and not to have to work in a mine or mill. The tunnel was shuttered after a blasting accident in 1943, and now all that comes out of it is acidic water into a treatment plant.

Denver and Fort Collins were nice: fun lunches with a couple of friends while they tried to persuade us to move to Colorado.  And then it was time to turn east for the drive home.  We had things to do, so it was time to put the hammer down, leave the mountains in the rear-view mirror (actually the side view: there’s too much stuff in the car to use the rear-view mirror) and crank out some miles. Eastern Colorado is a lot less dramatic than the western half, but does smell like a giant stockyard. We made it to St Louis in a day and a half of driving, stopping to camp in Nebraska.