Sunday July 10th (The Old Friend)

Up relatively late, well after sunrise, and rolled on down the road to Montrose.  Montrose was a place where I had a spot of bother a few years earlier where driving in the late dusk, only to have a giant truck tire materialize out of the dark where the lights didn’t penetrate.  I didn’t even have time to react, and plowed straight through it.  My only thought at the time was ‘Im going to luck to survive this’ as there was the massive thunk and the car jumped from the impact.  Maybe a second later, and much to my own surprise I still had the steering wheel in my hand and was in control of the car.  In disbelief I carefully slowed down and eased the car to the side of the road, watching in the rear mirror as at least one other pair of headlights swerved and jumped as they hit the truck tire among the smoke of locked wheels burning rubber.  Another guy also  stopped, as visibly shaken as myself, and we chattered for half an hour, telling each other over and over our frighteningly similar stories while comparing the damage to our vehicles.  Mine had fared much worse and was visibly leaking coolant.  That was bad, real bad.  Without coolant the car will overheat and destroy the engine in fairly short order, and I was still 50 miles outside Mostrose.  The guy who had shared my fate with the truck tire decided escort me to Montrose, just to make sure I made it, and get me to a radiator place.  I made it only to find out the next morning there was no real chance of getting it fixed in Montrose.  Further I had realised early on the AC was fracked, although I didn’t find out till later the AC radiator is in front of the engine radiator, and so had taken the brunt of it.  This had clearly caused the AC coolant to evaporate.  Eventually had to drive, very carefully to Colorado Spring to get the car fixed.

However this time all I was up for was to find a coffee shop to upload some stuff.  Spent the day preparing talks, and uploading things like the Phelps interview.  Rolled out in late afternoon towards Durango, and enroute I saw a sight!  An Old Friend from way back, Mount Sneffles.

Sneffles isn’t just one of Colorado’s 14 000 footers, its impressive.  Indeed when I first saw it, my first thought is, I have GOT to climb that thing!  Two days later I did 🙂 and it’s still one of my most fond memories of the West.  You really do feel on top of the world on that mountain, almost on a pillar with the ground dropping away on every side.  Looking down on one side to the jagged ridges of the Sneffles range, and on the other over the gentle hills to other distance mountain ranges of the Rockies.  The hike shattered me though.  You really need a 4×4 with high clearance to make it up to the trailhead (Yankee Boy Basin), and my polite, under-powered, and heavily laiden Little Blue NYer barely made it up the two wheel drive portion of the dirt road (and even that was incredibly hairy and touch and go!).  Still, one of the reasons I’ve been kitting the aerial video rigs up with HD cameras etc, and trying to get stuff sorted for remote piloting even at this obscene altitude is to fly from the top of Sneffles.  However while I hope to get up Sneffles before the end of this year, the time is not now.  I have a conference to prepare for and the I have to get my ass over to TAM (The Amazing Meeting) by saturday 😦 .

July 9th (DON’T BLINK!)

Up at about 6 after a terrible nights sleep.  Rolled on down to Cripples Creek, beautiful place, but unfortunately now turned into some sort of gambling resort.  Mind you, the place is pretty, but built on a gold rush that ended over a hundred years ago.  Decided to head out to the south towards Canon.  The GPS kept trying to divert me down a dirt road I didn’t want to go down, so I kept going on the paper map, until it appeared the GPS was right.  However after only a few hundred yards the blacktop ended and I was on a dirt road I didn’t really want to be on with some 29 miles left.. AG!  Clock was a ticking so I decided to keep rolling forward.  Initially it was easy through fairly flat forest, but then the terrain got progressively more impressive, then incredibly impressive.  I just couldn’t figure out what such an impressive dirt road was doing going through the middle of nowhere.

The drive was stunning and thankfully very short of cars coming in the other direction.  This is what I love about America, its not so much the things you know are there, it’s the things you don’t.  Lost and just looking for a way back to the main road, and you come across a gem like this!  For me it was at least as impressive as The Needles highway in the Black Hills.  The difference of course is that one crawls, where as this I only saw about 3 cars on.  However that cuts both ways, and more than once as I drove past sharp looking rocks in the middle of the road I though about how vulnerable my position was.  I had virtually no water or food in the car (I wasn’t expecting to be this isolated) and there was no chance of the phone working in such a deep gorge.  Go off the road here, and you may never be seen again!  I took my time :-), and not just due to the vulnerability, it was a beautiful place.  Rocks at the top were a sort of pink sherman granite-like, then lower down it became sedimentary of some sort.

So who would build a road like this?  I just couldn’t figure it out, it was a phenomenally expensive road to nowhere.  The answer came near the bottom.  Turns out Cripple Creek had been a gold rush town, and so they had built a railway up to it.  Hence the remarkably steady grade, and a road going through ‘mountains’ etc.

Back on the main road I picked up some fast food and headed onto Salida.  There I started to put some of my digital affairs in order.  Most notably to do some preparation on the talk I’m giving, and secondly to catch up with the blog and upload some of the footage I’ve got over the past few days.  Damn was the upload at mcdonalds slow.  Took a couple of hours to upload a 50mb video, and both time crashed just before the end (the connection reset) GAHHH!!  Still managed to get a load processed done though, before heading on up towards Montrose pass.  There was a small and very quiet and secluded siding for the old pass where I stopped for the night, oh… and that bliss of when the engine is turned off and there is complete silence in the forest, and just the gentlest of winds on the skin under the moonlit sky!