Rim Rock Drive to the Million Dollar Highway: A Driving Adventure [Sponsored]

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Colorado’s Western Slope lures outdoor adventurers with mountains, rivers, and protected wilderness. Rock-climbers, mountain bikers, white-water rafters, snowboarders, off-roaders, backpackers, and wildlife photographers increasingly populate the region’s small towns, bringing with them cafés and art galleries to supplant the Old West of cowboy saddleries and prospectors’ tool shops, like hipsters gentrifying the grittier districts of big cities.

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Today, tourists and vacationers power the Western Slope economy in equal measure with the energy industry that draws coal, uranium, oil, and natural gas from the same scrambled geology that makes such a great background for selfies.

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We flew into Grand Junction to start this 200-mile motorized adventure south to Durango. It’s worth noting you can get to Grand Junction (named for the confluence of the Green and Colorado—formerly Grand—Rivers) by interstate. The I-70 from Denver has only been open since 1992, when the last tunnel was finished, completing one of the last links in the network. As a marvel of civil engineering, it’s one of the rare stretches of super slab worth seeing for itself, as a road, but it’s also a driver’s nightmare of cross-country tractor-trailers being passed by molasses-slow motorhomes.

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Suitably, perhaps, two interesting roads that drew us to this auto-adventure were both built by guys named Otto. At the northern end, Colorado National Monument exists today largely because of conservationist John Otto. Inspired by his first visit in 1906, even as John Muir was working for the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone, Otto campaigned to have the area designated a National Park, and succeeded in 1911. Otto wanted a road to make these canyons northwest of Grand Junction accessible by car, so he set about building it, single-handedly, with pickax and shovel. His Trail of the Serpent, completed in 1921 after he’d enlisted more support, was a narrow path, barely amenable to Model T motorists. So it’s no good today except as a pretty spectacular hiking trail. As custodian of the park through 1927, though, Otto planned for a better, paved road. It finally came with the Great Depression, a project of the federal Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) jobs program and known today as Rim Rock Drive, a scenic sequence of tunnels, switchbacks, and curves with frequent turnouts where you can gape at your surroundings, set off on a hike, or learn about dinosaur fossils.

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Otto Mears, a Russian immigrant/entrepreneur, made his fortune building railroads to serve the booming mine industry, and toll roads connecting the communities of Ouray, Silverton, and Ironton in the late 19th century. One of those roads climbed out of Ouray and through three passes, each at an elevation over 10,000 feet, to reach Silverton. Mears’s toll road became today’s Million Dollar Highway, a 25-mile stretch of US550 that makes many top-10 lists, of “most beautiful” and “most dangerous” in equal measure. Its guardrail-free precipices and blind corners have been known to paralyze the timid into a full stop, following traffic be damned.

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Thoughts of traffic jams were far from our minds as we set out driving under a double rainbow into downtown Grand Junction. Take the rainbow as a hokey sign, or simply as evidence of overnight rain that would come and go throughout our 12-hour journey, it was just plain purty. As home to Colorado Mesa University, the city has a familiar college-town ambience, highlighted by a business district peppered with public sculpture, including a buffalo built out of chromed car bumpers.

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From there we made our way west to Rim Rock Drive, entering the Colorado National Monument. We’d considering going east to Grand Mesa, the largest flat-top mountain in the world and a park with its own famed 63-mile scenic drive. We’re Eastern flat-landers familiar with Grand Mesa’s promised forests and lakes but less jaded about giant slabs of rock poking into the sky. We got to the visitor’s center just as park geologist Rebecca Warren was about to start a presentation about the dramatic terrain. She explained the layers of rock visible, starting with the Precambrian gneiss and granite, up through the Wingate sandstone, the quartz-speckled Kayenta, up into mudstones, and then described why it’s now mountainous where once there’d been an inland sea, hence so many dinosaur bones found thereabouts.

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In nearby Fruita, Dinosaur Hill offers a walking path to view exposed fossils still embedded in the rock; a cool wind was bringing in more rain, so we mostly saw a hopping hare. It was neither sabre-toothed nor antelope-horned, so we headed for the nearby Dinosaur Journey Museum of Western Colorado and shelter from the shower. In its parking lot we encountered a Ford van that had been transformed into a rolling representation of a dinosaur via liberal application of fiberglass and/or blown foam insulation and paint. That’s when we realized that, a) the rain had stopped, so indoors was less enticing, and b) that we had misplaced our inner 12-year-olds. The penny-stamping machine even ripped us off for a buck, yielding an impression on only one side of the sacrificed coin. Disgruntled and under-caffeinated, we set off for less populated regions to restore our sense of wonder.

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Soon, it all went unexpectedly right. North of the town of Delta, a small marker promised a “point of interest.” It was not on our tour-guide-approved list of regional highlights, but we were driving rather than riding a tour bus so we could be free to follow such whimsies. This was Escalante Canyon and a simple sign told us how far to drive to encounter historic cabins, Ute Indian petroglyphs, an off-road trail, and more. Another sign told us the canyon had “hosted” a famous Sheep War in March 1916. The peace between sheep ranchers on one side of the canyon and cattlemen on the other had dissolved when a new bridge over the Gunnison River allowed ovine to dine on pasture reserved for bovine. Cowboys killed a heap of sheep and a shootout during the ensuing “war” claimed the lives of residents Cash Sampson and Ben Lowe. They’re named on the plaque, but it doesn’t say whether they died in defense of woolen long johns, grass-fed beefsteak, or one each. Here, though, was the history of the Old West a century ago, no traffic to be seen, and it was time to play.

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The first bit of unpaved road didn’t look all that promising, but three miles in we crossed a steel truss bridge over the Gunnison and the canyon walls started rising around us as we drove into the 1300-foot gorge on graveled trail bordered with juniper and sage. Another four miles and we came upon Walker Cabin, a stone homestead built in 1911 by bricklayer Henry Walker and his four sons. It’s still solid, though worse for wear, owned by the Colorado Division of Wildlife and visitors are free to wander about inside. It was quiet except for the birds calling, and phone reception went dead, although our car’s GPS still knew where we were. A few more miles of scenic trail, during which we passed a Subaru coming the other way and convinced a sage grouse to move off the road, and we’d arrived at the similarly weathered home of Captain Henry Smith. He’d come out from Joliet, Illinois, after fighting in the Civil War and built this cabin and an adjacent guest house using giant slabs of rock as shelter from the weather. While we climbed around on the rocks, a fellow drove up in a white pickup with U.S. government plates—BLM, we figured—and we chatted a bit. He told us the best petroglyphs were up the road another four or five miles, that we’d have to ford a stream but it was mostly dry just now, and warned us not to follow the navigation system’s directions back to the highway, that it’d be shorter and easier to just go back out the way we came in.

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Hungry and still in need of coffee, we left the petroglyphs for another day and made our way into Delta for lunch at a local restaurant. Like other towns along this route, it looked small but clean and relatively prosperous, with well-maintained buildings and few vacant. In the “family dining” joint we ran into traveling companions enjoying sandwiches that amounted to chicken parmesan drenched in Bolognese sauce and slapped onto a burger bun. Over strong coffee and a filling lunch (spaghetti and meatballs and an “Italian hamburger” that was essentially the same sandwich with a beef patty) we made a plan that would get us to the Million Dollar Highway shortly after 5 p.m. The state DOT website advised that the road would be closed from 8 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m. for maintenance—and a rock-slide had also taken out some power lines, so there were three projects underway.

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We found more public sculpture in Montrose, which is also home to a Museum of the Mountain West and jumping-off point for another National Park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. We were putting it in our mirrors when we came upon the Ute Indian Museum. We’d missed the petroglyphs so we stopped, only to discover the museum proper had closed in August for an expansion project opening in summer of 2016. Wandering around the grounds, though, we learned that this was the site of an 8.65-acre homestead owned by Chief Ouray, for whom the town farther south is named, and his wife, Chipeta. A monument to Ouray, Chipeta’s crypt, and a garden of native plants tell some of the story of the people who’d lived here centuries before they were forced out by European ranchers, miners, and farmers settling the region.

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Farther down the road in Ridgway, where True Grit was filmed, we wandered into a state park visitor’s center that offered a timely rest area and spectacular views over a lake to the taller mountains looming to the south. Thunder boomed from the mountainsides where we could see a storm crossing even as sunlight played off the other side. Soon, we were in Ouray, at the foot of the mountains and billed as “The Switzerland of America.” Nice town, but that big climb beckoned; we were ready to see what this Million Dollar Highway had to offer.

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First it offered a full stop. We’d just made the first grade and a switchback to an overlook where you could see back into Ouray, when we came up on the stopped line of traffic. Eventually the backup started moving, and we crawled behind a long line of vehicles onto the famous stretch of road, which doesn’t really invite haste, anyway. It is indeed, narrow, lacks guardrail, and there are places where we noticed bits of the white line that separates the road from the steep drop-off to the right had broken away. You’re on the outside while traveling south . . . any driver with trepidations should consider doing it northbound. Making hairpin turns on the outside commands your attention, especially after a glimpse in the right-side mirror shows no trace of pavement, just emptiness across the canyon.

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Soon, we came upon a flag station where only one lane of traffic could pass—the outer lane was simply gone, and construction equipment was parked in “our” lane on either end of that stretch. Farther along, there was another stretch where we proceeded in alternate directions. The road was there, but “our” lane was full of construction vehicles.

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Still, it’s amazing road. It parallels the narrow-gauge railroad that has inspired millions of modelers to re-create Colorado mining country in their basements. Have a passenger take photos of the spectacular views and don’t even think about picking up your phone—turnoffs are few and far between, the easiest being one in Red Mountain pass offering a view of the Idarado mine site across the road. Markers tell a story with elements of industrial innovation, environmental destruction, and individual bravery.

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Honestly? We’ve driven longer stretches of scarier road in Europe, but at least there they’ve the excuse that the paths were originally intended for oxcarts and Roman chariots. The Million Dollar Highway is just a short stretch of the much longer San Juan Skyway, all of which is rightly designated a scenic route, but you can’t complete the loop without this link.

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The next morning, a retired Durango city police officer told us there’s a memorial up there to snowplow drivers who’ve fallen off the mountain road. “It’s the most avalanche-prone, deadliest stretch of federal highway in the continental U.S.,” he said. “People go over the side pretty often.” Many in Durango, he claimed, won’t drive it in bad weather, preferring to drive an extra hour or more by heading west to Moab, Utah, then north and back east to Grand Junction.

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And the lack of guardrails? Two things: They’d often be damaged by sliding stone, which would be more likely to block the road, and it snows like hell here. Six-foot snowfalls aren’t uncommon…the state strives to keep the road open year-round, and the absence of guardrails makes it easier to push snow or fallen rock off the side. There may be chain restrictions in bad weather, and it will close for an hour or two while avalanche guns blast the dangerous accumulations off the mountainside, but the locals depend on this artery.

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Why is it called the Million Dollar Highway? Stories vary. One is that it took that much to build, back in the late 1800s, when a million was real money. Another is that that was the value of the gold and silver removed from the mountain during construction, a third story that it’s the value of the ore left under the road. Colorado spends way more than that every year to keep it open, certainly.

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With the stoppages, it took more than an hour to travel the 25 miles or so to Silverton and its Victorian-era historic downtown, rail museum, and other charms. It’s a little town up at 9305 feet of elevation, nestled between passes, nearly 3000 feet higher than Durango to the south and 2500 higher than Ouray. The railroad on the southern edge marks one boundary, but most other streets here just end where the ground gets too steep to build on.

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You climb out of it on 550 into Molas Pass, another 1600-feet up. We did it as dark was falling, in steady rain, wary of deer and bighorn sheep, and still it was an entertaining drive. Or maybe we’re just crazy for adventure at the wheel.

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We didn’t see Durango until the morning run to the airport. It was a full, 12-hour day, 8:30 to 8:30, to cover just a little over 210 miles. You can easily go that far on the interstate, with breaks, before lunch. You’d not call it an adventure, though. We only wish we could have taken another day or two to wander farther down the byways and side roads and spend a little more time out of the car.

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