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Colorado Back Roads & Mofat Tunnel
After completing T-33 Crash Trail, James and we start the trek back to Castle Rock. Continueing down Colorado 72, Peaks to Peaks Highway. This is a paved road that winds through the mou…
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Colorado Back Roads & Mofat Tunnel
After completing T-33 Crash Trail, James and we start the trek back to Castle Rock. Continueing down Colorado 72, Peaks to Peaks Highway. This is a paved road that winds through the mountains. With the Aspen and other trees almost at peak for the fall foliage, the road is heavily trafficked. The views are breathtaking. We make a few stops to take pictures as well. The road goes through the mountain town of Nederland. Its busy with traffic from the leaf peepers. A few miles south of town, we get off now Colorado 119 and onto country road 16 which will take us to the East portal of the Mofat Tunnel.
The Moffat Tunnel is a railroad and water tunnel that cuts through the Continental Divide in north-central Colorado. Named after Colorado railroad pioneer David Moffat, the tunnel’s first official railroad traffic passed through in February 1928.
I have been wanting to see this tunnel for many year. Unfortunately no trains passed in the hour that we waiting and eat lunch.
We backtrack a few miles, and going County Road 4N. As we climb the hill, the dirt road has not been maintained and has rocks. I choose to air down the tires from 28PSI to 18PSI to make a smoother ride. We were planning on driving Kingston Peak trail, but made a wrong turn. Instead of turning around, we chose to continue and see where these roads take us. We continued into Central City. Coming into town is when I starting having brake problems. I was noticing that as the day was going on, the brake pedal was getting softer/spongy. As I was driving into town, I was noticing a difficult time stopping. I have been on the brakes alot coming down the long grade into Central City, so I just thought that it was hot brakes. We walk around town for 30 minutes. Central city is a historic mining settlement founded in 1859 during the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush and came to be known as the “Richest Square Mile on Earth”.
We continue out of Central city on our way to Idaho Springs. We have more brake problems again. Coming down a long grade, I have almost no brakes. We pull off the side of the road, to left the brakes cool down. I do not know what is good on, so we decide to stop in Idaho Springs, left the brakes cool down while we all around and take the highway back to the house.
We thing the brake problem is that these are daily new brakes, we were very hard on them, on the trails, and with the higher altitude, they just got hot. We will see how they are on the drive home and make a decision about further investigation.