Finally finishing up this trip...
To recap, it was Wednesday. We spent the previous night in Durango. We both agreed that Durango was definitely someplace we wouldn't mind returning to someday.
Today we needed to make it to Pueblo, CO. We had two options, north through the San Juan Mountains, or west towards the Great Sand dunes. Seeing as we don't know when we would return to this area, we decided to take the "scenic route" over the mountains to Gunnison via Cinnamon Pass.
The highway towards Cinnamon Pass (the million dollar highway) was quite steep, twisty, and turny. My truck didn't really like it much, on some climbs it refused to go above about 15-20. That's ok, I watched the temperature gauge and let the truck do the heavy lifting. We were in no real hurry despite the distance we needed to cover today.
This was a pull-off along the highway, between Durango and Silverton.
We passed through Silverton, and instead of heading on up the highway, we split off at Silverton along a county road towards Animas Forks.
The scenery along county road 2 was pretty incredible. Unlike anything I'd seen before.
This is Animas Forks.
I took a few pictures, but I was eager to get up the mountain.
Here's the split between Engineer and Cinnamon. It was a hard call between the two, but I thought Cinnamon might be better for us (being our first time on these mountain shelf roads).
The views from this road were just ungodly. As you can see, the slope was pretty steep. You'll get a better perspective once I get the dash cam footage up. Passing people was quite intersting, especially for Megan, who was on the downhill side. She would release a barely audible squeak whenever we went a little off-camber or got a bit close to the edge.
The landscape really changes when you pass around 11,000 feet.
Where are the trees?
Summit, 12640 ft. It was cold and windy... evidence below!
From the summit.
The route back down was gorgeous too, because you descend downward into this long valley. Incredible. The colors were just unbelievable.
I didn't take many pictures between that last picture and air-up. Mainly because there was a very unexpected shelf road during the next section. Basically, we were hanging onto the side of a cliff face, on a little rock shelf. Butt was clenched. Much more intense than the roads even above 11,000 feet. I didn't even see this on the maps! Heck, 300 yards before the shelf began, I tried to talk Megan into driving! I think there's some dash footage of this section, but I definitely didn't document it well enough. Megan held on tight, and sounded like she was in labor during this section.
