Today we traveled a lot. We went the long way over the San Juan Mountain. We traveled over three passes that were at least 10,000 feet above sea level. The San Juan Mountains are just another part of the Rocky Mountains.
Crossing the San Juan mountains was uh exciting? There is one road that had never bothered me until now. It was so bad that I announced to my husband that I was not safe to drive and took a half dose of my anti psychotic, as prescribed. It is called the million dollar highway because that is what cost to build it, more than a century ago!
We stopped at a ghost town we'd never even heard of before, Ironton. It was raining and snowing in the mountains and I was nervous about road conditions and the fog and clouds made it difficult to see things. We are talking about coming back for a few days in September when some of the streams will be back to trickles. There are so many things we say that somehow we'd missed before.
Most of the streams and rivers coming out of the Rocky Mountains are in flood stage because the snow is melting so quickly. We stopped at a boardwalk that overlooks the Arkansas River. The water was moving so fast that it was dizzying, and totally brown with silt. The only streams that weren't were the ones in the San Juan Mountains, and those are colored by cyanide, mercury and other chemicals from the mining processes. The Environmental Protection Agency wasn't around when the mining was done a century ago.
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