SAN JUAN SKYWAY

Switzerland in the USA - We left Cortez to drive through the most spectacular Alpine scenery close to the New Mexican border. Bright green valleys with lime green aspen and the peaks ever-present. Up the Lizard pass lined with snowdrifts and fast flowing river snaking below us. David knows the names of all the mountain peaks and the passes some as high as 11,000 feet above sea level.

 

Fields and aspens

We have developed a routine where we stop off for coffee and this time we stopped at a little ski resort called Telluride nestling in the crook of the valley. Its a delightful little town and this is where Christine Binckley and Tom Cruise hang out. David spotted a bookshop with a coffee shop - say no more. My kinda bookshop with the best coffee we have had in the States so far, but then the coffee Downunder is hard to beat. It was a beautiful day so we popped into a deli to buy lunch and had our picnic in a field with the snow-capped peaks as our back-drop. We drove through the Dallas Divide and the Red Mountain pass through a town called Ouray stopping off at Silverton, a town that's straight out of a Western movie. This is Butch Cassidy country. The hotel's heavy mahogany bar even had a bullet hole in it - it didn't take much to imagine the people who must have lived in the town and frequented the hotel. This is a mining town and there are lots of abandoned silver and gold mine shafts in the mountains. Coal is still being mined in the area but I suspect that the town depends heavily on the tourist trade.

  

Silverton

More spectacular passes took us to Durango where we spent the night in an upmarket hotel on the banks of the Animus River. Durango is another mining town although now the vandium and uranium mines are closed. We had a lovely evening walking along the river and then went to a little French place for dinner where the size of the helping of coq au vin defeated us.  

In front of our hotel in Durango