Red Mountain Pass, again

This time in the winter

OK, I took you up over Red Mountain Pass last year:

And I took you up there again a few weeks ago, for the peak of Aspen color:

Red Mountain Pass

Now it’s time to go back in the dead of winter.

Here is the pretty town of Ouray, Colorado.

Ouray, Colorado. View from partway up the wall of the box canyon

Ouray, named for a Ute Indian chief, sits at the end of a box canyon in the San Juan mountains. It was Ayn Rand’s inspiration for her fictional town of Galt’s Gulch in the novel Atlas Shrugged.

It’s an old mining town that successfully made the transition to tourist trap, and is worth visiting on its own. It is also at one end of the most scenic stretch of road (in my opinion) in the United States. As I have warned in the past, if you are southbound DO NOT TAKE AN RV PAST THIS TOWN on US highway 550. Park the RV in town and take your toad on up over the pass.

If you need to get the RV to points south, go back to Ridgeway, take the RV over State Route 62 south from Ridgeway, which joins SR 145 near Telluride, and thence to Cortez, Durango, or where ever. There have been divorces, and even a few fatalities, from people taking an RV over Red Mountain Pass.

Once out of Ouray, the scenery just gets more and more breathtaking. You saw the Yankee Girl mine in one of the older posts linked above. Here it is with a blanket of snow:

Red Mountain #2 and the Yankee Girl mine

Paid subscribers received a full-sized, full-rez copy of this photo last week.

It looked like someone had been skiing up there, but I’m betting those are snowmobile tracks. Looks like fun. Further up the highway, right on top of the pass, there were all kinds of tracks where someone had a whole lot of fun.

Snowmobile tracks on top of Red Mountain Pass

Telluride is just on the other side (and WAY down below) of those mountains in the background.

If you’ve paid careful attention to my past posts, you know that Silverton is the next town on Highway 550. Silverton is where you park the RV if you’re coming north on that road.

There are more fine, fine views of mountains south of Silverton. The highway climbs up onto the sides of the mountains a little bit to avoid the Animas River canyon, and being on a mountainside affords some breathtaking views across the Animas canyon into the Weminuche Wilderness. This is the Grenadier range, and it’s all wilderness back there:

Oh, how my heart ached to go backpacking over there. But I was in no shape for backpacking in those years, plus I had a cat I had promised I would never abandon, even for a night¹. And I doubted that I could carry her for miles and miles over a trail! So, no backpacking for me while she was still alive.

A little farther up the road is this view of the Twilight Peaks. There are three of them:

North Twilight Peak and others, between Silverton and Durango

Paid subscribers also received a full-size, full-resolution copy of this photo last week.

This is North Twilight Peak. Middle Twilight and South Twilight are behind it.

This is God’s Country. Also known as the Switzerland of America. In the San Juan mountains. Scatter my ashes up there when I die, boys, that is the Heaven that I want to go to.

1. “As I pulled out my key to unlock the door, I heard the most pathetic meowing coming from the other side of the door that I have ever heard. Pookie! She knew who was on the other side of that door.

“Never in my life have I ever heard a more heartbreaking sound. She’d been fed and cared for by a neighbor, but she missed ME. Her human.

“I have never seen a cat so devoted, so attached, to its human. I say all this because soon, Pookie would become my constant traveling companion, roaming the American West with me. You will see her in many upcoming stories and photos.

“I promised her that night that I would never leave her again - and I didn’t, until the night, years later, that an ambulance took me away.” From "The Journey Home” Dec. 2023