Ambushed at Poughkeepsie Gulch

Good evening and welcome to day 2. Due to the incredible slowness of of the wifi here, I am going to tell the story as it happened, not how the fotos are positioned on the blog. To get to Poughkeepsie Gulch, you begin about 5 miles up the million dollar highway on the Engineer pass road. From my fading memory, this road was a mild easy trail you could coast up. Not anymore. Everyone I talked to agreed the trails are getting more difficult. Unlike Utah, where mini-vans are the new Jeep. We stopped at an old mine a few miles and took the bottom foto. It's so strange to see buildings and such from so long ago still surviving after so much time has passed.

 We continued the climb up the mountain to the turn off for the gulch. There are signs everywhere saying the trail is for modified 4x4's and lockers and winches are recommended. As usual, I didn't pay attention to it and plowed into the first mud pit I could find. Bob happened to tell me that there was mud coming in his side of the Jeep......I like to play like that. We climbed all the way up to the final obstacle and arrived at the hills. There are 3 ways up and the governing body of this area has kindly installed winch points to be used to help yourself if you don't make it. Well with all the rain and mud, the rock was slippery and I knew there was no way in hell I was going up those hills. I do take pride in that I was up there in a mostly stock Jeep. Everyone else, at the minimum, had Rubicon Jeeps and highly modified expensive built Jeeps. So ya, I was happy to be that far up yet sad because I couldn't do it. So, after taking a few minutes of video, we headed down the trail the way we had come and headed back up the mountain. The trail got better the closer to the top we got. We rounded a corner and what did we see????? 

 We saw a Subaru station wagon that had come up from the Animas Forks area. The trail out of Silverton to Animas Forks is a very easy trail. He was headed down and asked us if he was on the road to Ouray. I said yes and informed him there was no way in hell he was going to make it down in the Subaru. We continued up and Bob watched him go about 10 yards down the trail then get out and see for himself he wasn't gonna make it. Sure enough, as we sat and checked out an old mine area, here he comes flying up the road heading back to Silverton. We stopped in Animas Forks, took fotos and headed up California Gulch. Easy trail and it got us to 13000 feet. What a view. As we went down the trail, we took a road that led us to Corkscrew Gulch. From there, Red Mountain stood out like a sore thumb. All around you is a treeless, gray and green mountain range and then like that, you run into Red mountain, which is....red!

 We headed into the Red Mountain area and stopped to visit a few old mining structures. The head frame in the foto is Yankee Girl mine. I went inside and got some great shots of the building and all the surrounding areas. Yankee Girl is one of the most foto-graphed buildings around. But, most people do it from across the valley on the main road. They even built a nice new pull out for that sole purpose. Ya know, I would much rather see it up close and personal then shoot a foto from half a mile away. There is so much history in Ouray, you could spend weeks taking every trail to every site and not get bored.

Last but not least, I took a foto of Mr happy-face I'm certain most of you out there think it's stupid, but I don't.I kinda like him. Besides, he is yellow and matches the Jeep! Now I get to voice my opinion on stuff I saw today. Yes  its been 12 years since I was there, but the amount of ATV's was incredible. They were everywhere. I kinda miss the old days when all you saw on the trails were Jeeps and such. Another thing I noticed was Ouray has turned into Telluride. I have never seen that many people in the town except on the 4th of July party they have. I really don't like it. We didn't stop or anything, but there was hardly any parking on the road and wall to wall people walking the sidewalks. It used to be a quiet town and I liked it for that. OK, it's time to call it a night.... we have Black Bear pass to run tomorrow. Until tomorrow......Jeep on my friends.