It's summer and that means one thing: Time for the OFMC to hit the road.
So we did. Four of us headed out of Denver on Friday early, with another two coming later, meeting up with one more at our destination for the day, New Castle. It's too short a ride from Denver to New Castle for a day's ride so we took the long route, out U.S. 285 over Kenosha Pass to South Park and Fairplay, then over Hoosier Pass down to Breckenridge and Frisco. We picked up I-70 at Frisco but I led the guys on an alternate ride along old U.S. 6 where it still survives alongside the interstate. It's nice that you can still take the back roads even though the interstate has largely replaced it.
John, our chief route planner, had similar plans for the second day so rather than hop on the superslab and blast to Debeque we ran around the hills behind New Castle to some old county roads that people probably actually used a lot before the interstate was built. From Debeque we headed south across the Grand Mesa, with all its spectacular views both climbing on the north side and descending on the south side. The amazing thing is that some of these guys had never seen this road before.
Descending into the Grand Valley we ran into heat but resisted the temptation to blast south along U.S. 50, which has largely been converted to four-lane divided highway. Instead, we wandered through the valley on CO 348, a road none of us but John had ever seen before. Then it was Ridgway and up CO 62 which climbs the mountains behind Telluride. That's a shot of the back side of those mountains in the photo at left.
Picking up CO 145 at Placerville we headed southeast to Telluride for our second night's stay. Telluride on a Saturday is one hopping town.
Today then we continued over Lizard Head Pass down to Dolores, across on U.S. 160 through Durango to Pagosa Springs and then headed south on U.S. 84 to where we picked up U.S. 64 and turned east to Chama, NM. That's our third day's stop and where we are right now. And our eighth and final member cruised down from Denver to join us here today. Tomorrow we plunge deeper into New Mexico.
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