Day 14: US 550 photos

Today's stage from Montrose to Durango Colorado (109 miles, 8850' climbing) via Silverton was so staggeringly beautiful and so tiring that I'm skipping the snappy repartee and am just going to annotate the photos. Although I've been through Durango many times (in a car), I've never made north through the San Juan range to Silverton or Telluride, so this was all fresh to me.

This map image shows where we traversed the range:

 

 Heading south out of Montrose the San Juan range was side-lit by the rising sun:

Firday morning traffic was pretty bad with lots of trucks in a hurry to get somewhere. After riding an hour or so we were closer to the range

 

The Peakfinder app gives name and elevation - its one of Colorado's 58 "14ers"

We passed through the town of Ridgway which looks be a tourist mecca. That helped the traffic situation since now there were more cars than trucks, and they seemed to have a more sight-seeing nature.

The Uncompahgre River gorge which we will be riding up comes into view. Don't ask me how to pronounce that!

Nice!:

The Uncompahgre River within the gorge was surprisingly discolored.

The quaint hamlet of Ouray is tucked into the top of the river valley,

Surrounded by peaks. If you have a magnifying glass, Rachel can be seen riding through town in this one:

Once through town our future was foretold:

Starting a gorgeous climb:

Looking back down on Ouray:

Town promo plaques:

The road was cut into the side of a very steep valley

And includes a cute tunnel

And truly staggering drop-offs:

 

Its almost hilarious that there is no guard rail or even a small wall like on Going to the Sun Road (see prologue post). You could literally just fall off that. Same point from a distance:

They call this the million dollar highway, and like Steve G joked, maybe if it was the two million dollar highway it would have guard rails.

Looking down into a waterfall in the gorge below, zoomed and then not zoomed:

More leaf peeper action once we were above 9000':

The road leveled out for a while, which broke the ascent into two climbs, which made it much easier than yesterdays:

One we resumed climbing again we were among these red mountains:

Which were been mined extensively from 1880s to 1970s:

Those tailing piles seemed to be the source of the water discoloration as the feeder streams above this point had crystal clear water.

Interestingly one of the main shafts goes under the mountain all the way to Telluride, which I guess is about 6 miles by mine tunnel, 60 miles by car!

The bald mountains reminded me a bit of those tall hills in Scotland. Of course these are much much bigger:

First of three passes reached! I think this will be the high point (in the elevation sense) for the tour:

Heading down toward Silverton

 

 

Lunch was in Silverton which is the terminus for the steam locamotive tourist railroad

The climbs resumed right outside of town. Although it was very hard to pedal at first due to being off the bike and stuffing myself, after 10 minutes the legs warmed up and I made OK time up the hill:

Second of three passes reached! You can see by my outfit that the day was getting warmer.

Descending off Molas Pass, an amazing mountain:

 

 

 Identified with the help of Peak Finder:

 

 

 

The last of three passes completed:

My sartorial motto is "Dress to be noticed by cars, even if that notice is a scoff!"

On the way down to Durango we passed through Purgatory. Luckily we weren't stuck there