Monday, October 7, 2019

Million Dollar Highway





Today our main planned activity was to drive the Million Dollar Highway to Durango, then on to Pagosa Springs.  A 12 mile stretch of this road is flagged as a very dangerous highway.  Mary can now attest to that as she calls it  "White Knuckle Way".  The northern end of the Highway starts at the town of Ouray (picture at top left).  I could tell Mary was a bit worried when, as I was driving about 15 mph, she kept repeating "Slow Down!, Slow Down!".  But it was a beautiful drive and we had beautiful weather - sunny with a cloudless sky. We caught much of this area at peak fall color as you can see from the bottom two pictures.


We made it to Durango by 11:00 am and only had a 1 hour drive to Pagosa Springs ahead of us, so we consulted a paper map and decided to visit the Four Corners.  Mary had talked about going there and I was intrigued, so we decided to spend our afternoon on this side trip.  It was a 3 hour drive, but well worth it to check this item off of our bucket list.

So after driving a lot of miles today we'll take it easy this evening to get ready for our drive across Wolf Creek Pass to Buena Vista tomorrow morning.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like another great day. Beautiful pictures - the four corners is very cool. All those golden apens are what we just miss during AiO weekI Glad you are getting to see them at their peak.
Have fun as you continue your journey!
Gail

Warren said...

Gorgeous photos! The Aspens remind me of Flagstaff! Four corners is cool but gosh there's not much else there, huh!? Been there a few times. You should have taken the Durango - Silverton train, especially this time of year. I have about 300 photos from about 25 yrs ago when I went on it the second week of Oct. It was my favorite trip! Have fun today...but you need to get out of the mountains...headlines today: "Temperatures to plunge as snowstorm aims for Denver area! Temps expected to go from 80 degrees to 20."

Anonymous said...

Beautiful photos , the aspens look so pretty . Wow 4 states meeting , amazing .
I do believe Mary was a little frighten from her email to me ha . Enjoy Aspen . thinking of you both . Pat