Skip to my Lou: On to Denver

over the Million Dollar Highway.

Today was an easy day. A day that reminded me why I like road trips: a good companion, a comfortable car, and gorgeous scenery. This portion of the trip was planned by pulling out a paper map and following the green dotted lines (scenic route) up to I-70 then taking that east to Denver. Even I-70 was gorgeous and you can’t say that about an expressway very often. There were only ~60 miles in the center that were blah – and we stopped for lunch there. That’s one of the nice things about paper maps – you can easily pick out the scenic routes. I haven’t figured out how to do that with Google Maps or the Garmin yet.

The whole trip was a lot of ups and downs – 23,666’ up and 25,563’ down to be exact. Here’s the elevation from the Garmin track log:

The five peaks are: Coal Bank Pass (10640’), Molas Pass (10970’), Red Mountain Pass (11018’), McClure Pass (8755’), Vail Pass (10603’), and the entrance to the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 (11161’). As I said, up and down. Not so easy to show the “I’m leaning toward the center of the car” moments, however.

Back to the Million Dollar Highway. This refers to the section of US-550 between Silverton and Ouray. Wickipedia says the origin of the name is disputed but it certainly must have cost a mint to build it in the 1920’s. Twisty, turny, up and down, narrow lanes, few guard rails – in other words, fun to drive but expensive to build. Look up the history yourself: US-550. And absolutely gorgeous.

I don’t have many pictures because I find scenery hard to get good photos of, but here’s a few.