Friday Traveling

We decided to do a little cycling around town in Durango before leaving. This is a bike town and as such it has it's own bike highways of a sort. The Animas river trail was very scenic with artwork here and there, businesses right along the trail, and small-gauge rail just a few feet away at times.

Heading out, we plan to stop in Parker, CO for the night. We are at about 7000ft elevation here and we'll have to climb up to 10,000ft or so through Wolf Pass. We're going to avoid I-70 this time since it's having problems with snow.

After Pueblo, near the sand dunes area, we saw what appeared to be a large grass fire. This turned out to be a huge dust storm. It was so big that we were in and out of it for 30-40 miles.

Starting to get out of the mountains and back into the plains.

Last hotel, and then we head home tomorrow.

Thursday in Durango

This morning we decided to ride the Colorado Trail which begins/ends (depending on the direction you're headed) right outside Durango. It was definitely a huge contrast to what we've been riding in Moab. We did an out and back totaling nine miles. I'll have to check the GPS file to see just how much climbing we actually did, you can see in one of the overlook pictures that we are a ways up there after leaving from the trailhead right next to the river. Weather was fantastic today, you could be wandering around next to a snow pile, sun shining, wearing short sleeves.

Later we went a different direction, this time right next to town. The Horse Gulch trail system. It was a lot of fun with ups and downs that were really flowy and pretty smooth. There is an impressive number of trails in this system, totaling about 28 miles. We only rode a couple of loops but it was well worth the trip over.

Hoping to see some more of Durango tomorrow - historical district etc. then do some driving and head toward home.

Wednesday in Mesa Verde

Today we headed over to Mesa Verde National Park. We discovered that almost half the park is closed during winter months, but were still able to see a lot of ruins and a lot of great views. I'm amazed how well this stuff is preserved when it's 800+ years old and sitting outside.

We took a guided tour of the cliff palace ruin which was fantastic. It was quite large and fairly original (park service estimates that it's about 30% reconstructed). It's also an odd one because it has enough area to hold meetings and rituals for double the amount of people that could actually live there.

We went to most of the overlooks along the roads and trails. Some were just overlooks and some had good views of other village ruins.

A couple shots of a burnt forest. I don't recall the numbers but something like 30,000 acres of forest has burned through this park in the last 15 years including some areas around the buildings. It also appears that they've installed some sort of sprinkler system around the buildings and along roadways. I'm not sure how that will work but it all looks recently installed, no pictures of that unfortunately.

After the park, we took off for Durango. I've now learned that all camping is always closed in the rockies during "winter" months, which appear to extend through April. We had the same problem last year near Georgetown, but I figured we're at low enough elevation here to be o.k. No big deal, we found a nice hotel and showers will be nice.