The high country trip

The trip to the high country is a couple days behind us, but we're still looking over the more than 1,500 pictures we took ... and the experience is still present in our minds and hearts. 

In some ways, it was a lot to take in ... the terrain, the historic structures, the flowers, the totality of the experience. I've been around the Alpine Loop maybe six times before, but not in the last 12 years. And this was the first time with Sandy sharing the experience, mingling her photographer's eye with mine.

The territory that lies beneath and around the road is beautiful by itself, but much is added by the vestiges of mining and past times ... haunting reminders of what people were willing to endure in their search for silver and gold and other minerals. 

We started Wednesday morning with a brief look around Lake City, which is charming. Like Silverton, it has a lot of old store fronts that are colorful. Definitely a tourist town, and most of the license plates are Texas ... it's been a Texas outlier for a century or more. The town was founded in 1874, twenty years before Mancos was incorporated. The Baptist Church (shown) is almost storybook pretty, and the Presbyterian Church is the oldest Protestant church on Colorado's Western Slope.

The road up the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River to Cinnamon Pass is not as scary in some ways as the road over Engineer Pass, but the place shown here used to have a flattened jeep at the bottom of dropoff!

The flowers in American Basin were beautiful, there was always the sound of water running, but I still don't think the diversity of species is as great as we see up at Kennebec Pass, nearer to home.

I'm glad we went on weekdays, because the traffic wasn't bad; I've heard it gets pretty crowded on weekends and that could be dangerous. Sandy noticed that the vast majority of drivers and riders on ATVs, dirt bikes and 4-wheel drive cars appeared to be at least 60 years old ... old geezers enjoying the mountains.

Sandy especially enjoyed the look on one driver's face as we started up from Animas Forks toward Engineer Pass ... there was gleeful joy on the white-haired woman's face, and Sandy had yet to see what that lady had just traversed! tv