Greetings, all, and welcome to the final episode of Respect the Liberty, as we take to the mountains around Ouray for the last time and eventually return to our drudgery-filled lives in the Real World.
With a couple extra days in Ouray to explore on our own, we headed back up to Ophir Pass and had a pretentious lunch in Telluride.
We began our return trip to Ohio via Corkscrew Pass, sans hail this time.
Hurricane Pass appears to be in need of a new sign.
We headed down to the shore of Lake Como on what is technically the Poughkeepsie Gulch trail, one that our little Liberty has no business being on (impassible when wet and from my understanding impassible without a winch). The short section of road leading down to the lake was steep and rocky and we kinda wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. The two commercial tour trucks that were down by the lake kept an eye on us to make sure we could get back up to the main trail.
We're not sure what the story is about this marker, which we found bolted to the rock at Hurricane Pass. A search of this guy's name brings up an obit, but no word on how he met his demise (hopefully it had nothing to do with standing up in the back of an open Jeep). Since it occurred in January, I kinda doubt that it happened at this spot.
We pause at Hurricane Pass before heading into California Gulch.
The view down California Gulch.
On the way up Engineer Pass. The difficult section of the Engineer Pass Road is down near the bottom...this part, albeit steep and narrow, was not bad.
We pose at the top of Engineer Pass and recalled memories of my father, who had always wanted to drive up to Engineer Pass (in all honesty, I don't think his 1991 Ford Explorer was up to the task). From here it was all downhill to Lake City, then north to I-70 and eventually home.
*sigh*
We're looking for jobs in Grand Junction, Colorado...2 hours from Ouray, 2 hours from Moab.
