Colorado Day 3, High Rockies

Day three was another long haul. Starting at the Willow Creek camp, we headed along the Colorado River Headwaters Byway till we hit Kremmling. Which probably means we missed some of the better parts of that Byway, shucks. From Kremmling we headed south to Dillon, which I thought was a very scenic section of highway, past Green Lake?. Lunch was had at the Dillon Dam Brewery. It was good. It was huge. Couldn't finish it in fact! From Dillon we headed south through Breckenridge and over Hooser Pass.

South of Alma we turned onto County Road 19 and headed off to Mosquito Pass. We were running the route "in reverse" from what it seems like most people do. Its an offroad road so I didn't care what direction we went. A lot of this trail is pretty mild but the upper sections DO need high clearance and I needed 4wd once on the way up, and needed the low geared transfer case on the way down since I cooked the brakes on the way off mount evans. Oops.

This image doesn't look so bad...until you realize that is has got to be a good 20% grade or more! And most of it has water running down it.

Looking back down the road in. You can see the London Gold Mine ruins a little. there was a flock of Jeep JKs there when we drove by but they were headed down the valley.

The actual mine shaft for London. This is where the easy trail ends when you are coming from the East.

Proof! It was very windy and only about 50F at the pass. Now most people climb the ledge road section from Leadville to the Pass, we descended it and got some absolutely incredible views of the rain showers moving across the valley.

We survived the descent and took a pit stop at the diamond mine outside Leadville. This is the western terminus of the Mosquito Pass Trail. Once we got down to Leadville we shot off to Buena Vista to find a camp for the night. Sadly the three FS campgrounds on Chalk Creek were full! We couldn't believe it. And we didn't have a map of Pike forest so we didn't know where the other campgrounds in the area were. :( So we ended up at the private Chalk Creek Camp Ground and RV cesspool. This reminded me of why I don't stay at private campgrounds.