Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Colorado Travelog #26
Montrose, CO - Wednesday, 6 Jul 2022, 10pm

This evening we're in Montrose, Colorado, holing up at a Holiday Inn Express. There's not much to say about Montrose.... It's a crossroads town in western Colorado... with a Holiday Inn Express. 🤣

After finishing our hike to Bear Creek Falls this afternoon we grabbed a late lunch in Telluride. We were too tired and hungry to plan much else so we went to literally the closest restaurant, a brew-pub 1½ blocks from the end of the trail. It was pretty good. I had a chimichurri steak with a small sampler of beer then a pint of the beer I liked best. The beers were surprisingly high in alcohol content, like 8-9%. I passed the car keys to Hawk after 2 pints.

While we were dining the sky, which had been gray off and on for much the day, opened up and began pouring rain. We had chosen to dine on the patio, as the weather was nice outside until then. For a few minutes we huddled together under the patio umbrellas. Then we determined the rain wasn't going to let up so we asked to be seated inside. We were the last of at least half a dozen groups who braved the weather outside.

The drive from Telluride to Montrose was barely 70 miles and took about an hour and a half. It seemed like it took 2 hours, though. I blame the rain for slowing things down.

On our way around 14,000 ' Mt. Sniffles, crossing over the Dallas Pass at about 9,000', we saw snow on the road side. It didn't snow on us (temps never dropped below 46° F / 8° C according to our truck's air thermometer) but snow had fallen at that level not too much earlier in the day. And Mt. Sniffles was streaked with snow in all of its crevices. I don't know why Coloradans gave this 14,000 ' mountain a lame name like Sniffles. With its broad shoulders and angular crown, a mountain like that in, say, the Trinity Alps of California would be named Odin's Throne or Mt. Storm King. But here it's Mt. Sniffles.

The weather cleared up this afternoon in Montrose. It probably kept raining in the high mountains around Telluride, but here in Montrose we're in terrain more closely matching high desert. We soaked for a while in the hot tub before going back out to rustle up some dinner. Montrose being... well, basically nowhere... stuff was closing down at 8. We ended up going through a McDonald's drive thru (they closed the dining room at 8 but ran the drive through later) and eating our food on a picnic table in front of the restaurant at dusk.

Back here at the room, now, we're taking it easy for the rest of the evening. I'm catching up a bit on my blog backlog, and Hawk is doing some work. Ugh. I'm glad my time off from work is actually time off from work.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day. We'll do a bunch of short hikes at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, which is about 30 minutes from here, then drive on to Glenwood Springs a few hours away. It'll be a full day.

Update: I forgot to mention we scored a big suite upgrade at the hotel due to my Platinum Elite status. See a walkthrough of the "suite" life in my next blog.

Colorado Travelog #24
Telluride, CO - Wednesday, 6 Jul 2022, 11:30am

Today we're hiking the Bear Creek trail in Telluride. It's a 5 mile round-trip hike with a gain of a little over 1,000'.

Like several other trails in Telluride (and for that matter, Ouray too) the Bear Creek trail starts at the end of the street in residential area only a few blocks from downtown. Parking was already getting busy by 9:45 when we arrived. We found a spot 4 blocks away. We hit the trail part of the trail by 10am.

The first leg of the trail climbs through the forest before rounding a bend into the Bear Creek valley. After a mile or so the view start to open up.



The trail here doesn't look too steep— and it isn't. The stretch up to this point is steeper, but even that is gently graded. This is one of those trails where you climb 1,000' but don't feel like you've climbed 1,000'.



Various hiker comments in trail blogs warned us about how crowded this trail can get. Indeed, the parking crunch at the bottom led us to believe it'd be a crowded day. And while ideally we could've started an hour earlier (but couldn't because our AirBnB was unexpectedly 45 minutes away) hiking it now really hasn't been that bad. Part of it is that the trail is wide, a cleared fire road most of the way up. Groups can pass each other without squeezing past. If this were a single-track trail it'd feel a lot more crowded. Then too, it's not that late. I imagine people only just starting the trail now are seeing more crowds than we have.



The views in the first two photos I've shared here are the sides of the canyon. It's beautiful walking below the towering ridges, but also beautiful is the waterfalls at the back of the canyon (photo above). This is still just a distance view of the falls; we're still a few hundred meters away. According to hikers we just spoke to the trail goes right up to the bottom of the falls. Look for up-close pics in my next blog!

Colorado Travelog #15
Telluride, CO - Monday, 4 Jul 2022, 5:30pm

Despite getting a bum steer on staying Telluride the next few nights we decided, "We're here now, let's make the best of it." There was a waterfall we could basically drive to, so we visited that first. ...Mind you, it was one you could drive to with 4 wheel drive and high clearance. Thus why I paid, like, 3x the price of renting a sedan to get a Toyota Tacoma 4x4 (and also why I was frustrated when it came shod with poor tires).



Bridalveil Falls is big enough that we could see it a few miles back in the valley around Telluride. I just kept driving in its direction. Soon paved road turned to dirt and gravel. Then there was a parking lot where most people parked. The trail to the base of the falls was just over a mile with about 800' of ascent from there. But the road continued for the skilled and well equipped. I switched into 4-Lo and drove another 2 miles up rocky switchbacks. We parked in a small lot at the base of the falls alongside mostly Jeep Wranglers.

The road continued up a bit from the base of the falls. It goes to the top of the falls. There's a power generating station up there. I'm not sure how it generates power as it's atop the falls.

The road continues beyond the top of Bridalveil Falls. It's one way the opposite way, though. It comes over the Black Bear Pass from Red Mountain south of Ouray. We parked the truck and walked up the road a bit to catch a better view of Ingram Falls.



Ingram Falls has several tiers. The drop shown in the photo above is near the top. Further down it falls in a series of small cascades. In total it's over 2,000' of falls, basically from the top of the ridge to the bottom of the valley.



Speaking of top and bottom of the valley, here's a pano from where we parked our truck on the Black Bear Pass road. That "tiny" waterfall off on the left is 200'+ Bridalveil Falls.

Colorado Travelog #13
Telluride, CO - Monday, 4 Jul 2022, 2:30pm

As enjoyable as our hike at Devil's Kitchen this morning was, it  was not "it" for the day. Not by a long shot! From there we drove to Telluride, where we plan to do several hikes over the next few days, including at least one later this afternoon.

Telluride is a pleasant drive of about 2.5 hours from Grand Junction. We filled up with lunch first after our hike, choosing to eat at a Del Taco in Grand Junction. There aren't many Del Tacos in our part of California anymore, so we like to visit them when we find one while traveling. If you're not familiar with Del Taco, think of it as, "What if Taco Bell food didn't look and taste like mystery sludge?"

After lunch we stopped in the town of Delta for Dairy Queen. DQ is another restaurant there aren't (m)any of within quite a distance of home anymore. Like yesterday, Hawk got a sundae and I got a Blizzard. This time I tried the Girl Scout Thin Mint Blizzard. It was awesome.

Anyway, Telluride!



As we rolled up on Telluride we were blown away by the scenery. Tall, steep, mountains crowd in a tiny valley. Just driving toward it we could already see multiple waterfalls at the back.

We're spending the next two nights in Telluride. We actually wanted to spend 3 but couldn't find a reasonable rental even months in advance. Initially we thought about spending the whole week here. See, Telluride was the impetus for this whole trip. When we were looking up Colorado hikes for a previous trip we found a cluster of them right around Telluride.

"Let's plan a trip there!" we agreed. "We could even stay for a full week."

"But it's remote," I pointed out as I started to draft travel plans. "We'll need time to travel in and out."

"Okay, let's visit other stuff in Colorado, too," we agreed.

So that's how we planned this 8-day trip around spending 3 days in Telluride, spending a few days getting there and a few days getting back, doing lots of hikes on both sides of it.