It started out as a 4 hour tour… Gilligan… well we did start out on a back road trip to Denver. Tired of the interstate so I figured why not go up the back way of HWY 67 through Victor and then on to Deckers and up to maybe the Bucksnort bar and into Denver that way… The first part was ok… we made it up Phantom Canyon with a few stops for tourist stuff..
Well before we got past Highway 50 I had to stop and watch the model RC plane guys… spotted one as we came up the hill so stopped and watched this guy fly one – upside down and doing loops!… cool
hard to see but big bank to right as he took off then a loop (couldn’t get that)..
We stopped at one of the old railroad water stations on the trail and spotted the well that supplied water up to the tower (all gone now but the rock well is still there.
A bit further up we found that Wilbur is for sale? or maybe at Wilbur there is stuff for sale… no buildings in Wilbur..
We side tracked a bit into Victor and found the big blue elk… hum..
a lot of old shacks in Victor for sale and a lot more needing to be sold and fixed up but this jeep form Arkansas? not sure why Steve eats mud? you know something about people form Arkansas…
I was thirsty but she said no! so we kept going…
Here is the story of Victor or at least a little about it all…
We then circled on out and through Goldfield and then up to re-meet with HWY 67… the old tunnels on 67 are closed up now and new road bypasses them… or at least some do. Lots of building going on up toward Divide too.
we hooked it right to Woodland Park and made a pit stop and figured we should only be about and hour from Buck Snort… wrong… instead of getting on 67 north I moved over to Rampart Range road and punched in Bucksnort on the internal jeep GPS and it had a route for us… great a little back country drive would be ok…
The first bit of Rampart range road was fine… but the damn GPS talking head got us off on a Forest Service road 320 then 322.. the trails got progressively worse…
and that was not the worst just one that I could get a picture of… the scenery was great though..
not sure about this, don’t shoot the trees but they shot up the sign?
plenty of flowers up there too.
We passed a sign that said balanced rock road… well here it was and then several more further in..
in fact they were all over the place..
We finally had to turn around as we hit a dead end at a small lake at the end of 322. Before we hit that dead end the damn GPS said now go off road 1.2 mile to where I wanted to to? well not there as it was way rough and really blocked with trees? stupid GPS.
So we turned around and headed back out to find Rampart Road and follow that but we weren’t done being stupid. We put in the final destination in the GPS and it said to take Fern trail? we looked and determined no we needed to stay on the better road then it said to take another trail and it looked ok so we dumped off on it and about half a mile down it got worse than the other trails then it said to turn on forest trail 350A and had a sing that Hwy 67 was only 10 miles down that trail…? well that trail got even worse than the previous ones and once on it you couldn’t turn around so we committed to drive that 2 miles down on 2 tires mostly… the other were either up or down over rocks and in holes… but we meet to crotch rockets coming up and then a site of a big motorhome in the clearing below… civilization!… we passed the campsite and turned right (by the stupid GPS) and ended about 1 mile up at private property gates? so we turned around and in doing that we saw the sign that said Hwy 67 1.5 miles back that way… it was now 4pm and we found a real road with signs and markers… and rushed on to be at our end point by 5pm or so… But the tale of woe is not done yet… we found the small town of Pine and figure that we were within reach of BuckSnort but it was starting to rain so we chugged on and then… it started to hail…
it was just pea size but we pulled over and debated on going or waiting it out… decision to drive on and glad we did that because as we hit 285 we got cell signals and got a warning about a severe storm at “Pine” with golf ball size hail”… whew glad we passed through and didn’t stop… but it rained pretty good on down the road till we cleared past Conifer… We had no further trouble or adventure and got to our end point about 5:30 or so… one thing that did happen was during the rough roads our dogs who usually are on the console and peering out the front were a bit shaken I think… yes we had the two and were taking them with us to Denver for the few days we had to be there but they were not excited about the really rough trails…
So went our back way to Denver… I need a better GPS or maybe I should go back to real maps that are up to date?
WD0AJG