Today’s trip was short on distance and long on interesting stops. Since we left Boise I have had to continue to alter our travel path due to numerous wild fires throughout Utah. I have long wanted to travel the “Million Dollar Highway” that runs from Ouray to Durango in western Colorado. We almost had to give up on this as well as there are several yet uncontrolled fires in Colorado that had this highway closed until recently. Fortunately, it’s open now and we took the opportunity to head up high into the mountains. For the first couple of hours we drove through very smoky valleys and saw some of the fires in the mountains to our east, but they never got close to the highway.

For decades this road was labelled the “most dangerous road in the US”. Constructed in the 1920s, it is famous for its steep cliffs, hairpin turns, no guardrails, and roughly seventy named avalanche paths crossing the road between Ouray and Silverton. I had a great time white knuckling the south bound lane that runs the outer portion of the cliff side, allowing the girls to look out their windows to instant death below. They repeated advised me to watch the road and not crash.

Our first stop was in Ouray. Just outside of town is a nice hike up to Box Canyon falls with a 285’ waterfall. You can just make out Brenda and Josie near the cave opening.

Brenda determined to find out what’s in that cave.

Continuing south up in the mountains and down one unlabeled trail is a ghost town – the remains of “Ironton”. This town sprang up in 1883 after prospectors struck rich silver deposits nearby, growing almost overnight into a town of roughly 1,000 people with saloons, hotels, schools, brothels and a rail connection south to Silverton. The 1893 silver crash, combined with corrosive sulfide ore that ate through mining equipment, gutted the local economy. After this the population dwindled steadily into the 20th century. The post office closed in 1920 and the last resident died in the mid-1960s, leaving the handful of weathered buildings that still stand today along the Million Dollar Highway. We crawled through the safer looking of the remaining structures and wandered the rest of the town’s footprints looking for treasures.

Ironton lied next to the aptly named Red Mountain Creek. Its color comes from a mix of two things – there is natural leaching of iron out of the ground and staining the creek red-orange even where no mine ever existed. The other half is acid mine drainage — snowmelt and rain filtering through the leftover waste rock and ground-up ore material dumped near a mine after the silver had been extracted over a century of mining.

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Along the trail we ran into a couple of other dogs not on leashes. Winston had to suffer the indignity of a rather intimate greeeting.

Old buildings through the aspens. Before we left I headed out alone to heed the call of nature.

And ran into this guy who was curious enough to see what I was doing (one hand taking care of business, the other frantically trying to work a camera).

We are near the top of the pass, this mining set up is at over 11,000’.

This is the Yankee Girl mining headframe – the building built right over a vertical shaft that holds the pulleys and hoists and allows the miners to go down and bring up silver-infused iron ore. This shaft goes almost straight down 1,200 feet through twelve underground levels. Over sixteen years of operation the mine produced nearly $12 million in silver, worth over $100 million today, making it one of the most valuable mines in the country before 1900.

We continued south into Silverton – and got a late lunch.

Tourism is the only purpose of this town now. We walked up and down the main street and poked into the shops.

This high up the temperature dropped 20+ degrees from what we were used to. We wish we had brought light jackets.

After this we finished up our day in Durango. After checking into our hotel Brenda and I went into the central district to look for some budget art galleries, but the trip was largely a bust. We finished up hitting a Walgreens and grocery store for supplies and returned to the hotel for a dinner in and Netflix.