Last Saturday John and I decided to take a drive to see the fall colors. There was no real plan set, just drive. I had a general idea on which direction I wanted to head. We took off towards Leadville, CO. As we got closer to Leadville I opened the USA Atlas and found a road that went west from Leadville. I figured that since it was on the USA Road Atlas that the road must be passable. I knew it would be a dirt road but I had no doubt that our Mazda CX5 would be able to handle it. My plan was once we were finished with the dirt road, we would loop back down to Aspen and then back up to Leadville to go home.
All was good for a while. As we round a corner on this dirt road the terrain suddenly changed from a nice smooth road to jeeping road (a road for high clearance vehicles). We debated on whether to turn around or not. We walked up the road a bit to see if it got worse. We decided that we would try and go as far as we could with our car. If we had to turn around, so be it. We SLOWLY made our way up and over the pass. I'm pretty sure we could have walked faster than what we had to drive to make sure we didn't scrap the bottom. We were very successful in not scraping once.
By the time we got up and over the pass and back on to pavement it was really late in the day. Plans needed to change once again. We headed north to Glenwood Springs and then back on I70 to home.
This day turned out to be an 11 hour drive with all the stops we made along the way. We were tired but it was beautiful and well worth it.
Here is the map of our drive and some pictures from the trip.
