Fri, Sep 14th - Salida to Ouray, CO & Box Canon Falls

We left the Salida Wal-Mart about 8:00 a.m. this morning and headed down Rt. 50 thru Gunnison and Montrose, CO. (The same Rt. 50 that's in Virginia that Aunt Katherine lives on, that comes across the US.) The Discovery did just fine going up and over Monarch Pass, which is 11,312 ft. Here we drove over the Contential Divide again. We had 6% grades coming down from the pass and very curvy "S" turns. This is the highest that the Discovery has been!

The above picture is my favorite so far! This shows the Dillion Pinnacles, which is a mesa, and the Blue Mesa Resevoir. This resevoir is Colorado's largest man-made body of water. It seemed like it went on forever! I think I read that it has 96 miles of shoreline! Here's some more scenery that we saw. What a beautiful sky!

We checked into the 4J+1+1 Campground in downtown Ouray about noon time. Ouray is known as the "Switzerlund of America." After we got all settled in, we drove up to Box Canon Falls and went down the stairs to the base of the falls and up the stairs and rock path to the bridge over the falls. The bridge had open grates, so you could see right thru it down to the falls and stream below and we had a great view of the town of Ouray. At this point, we were 8,100 ft above sea level. Here's a few photos of what we saw.

Here's one of the walkway that we went on to get down to the bottom of the falls.

Here's a picture of the town of Ouray. You can see that there are mountains all around it. We are camped down on the bottom left side of this picture along a river.

You can't see the bottom from this picture, but it does show the open grates! And I'm only showing you the next picture to show what the bridge looked like--excuse the butt shot that Chuck took!

Ouray: http://www.ouraycolorado.com/ ; www.cityofouray.com