| General description: This 87-mile drive, part of the San Juan Scenic Skyway, follows U.S. Highway 550 over 3 lofty mountain passes between Durango and Ridgway.
Location: Southwestern Colorado. The drive follows US 550 between Durango and Ridgway.
Route name and number: Million Dollar Highway, US 550.
Travel season: Year-round. The drive is occasionally closed in winter due to heavy snow and avalanche danger. Chains are often required to drive the highway.
Special attractions: Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, Durango National Historic District, Purgatory Ski Resort, San Juan National Forest, Animas River Canyon, Weminuche Wilderness Area, Molas Pass, Molas Lake, Silverton National Historic District, Red Mountain Pass, Box Canyon Falls, Ouray National Historic District, scenic views, camping, backpacking, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, historic sites, fall colors.
Camping: Several national forest campgrounds lie on or just off the drive, including Chris Park, Haviland Lake, Purgatory, South Mineral, and Ampitheater. Dispersed, primitive camping is permitted on both BLM and National Forest public lands along the drive.
Services: All services are found in Durango, Silverton, Ouray, and Ridgway.
More information: San Juan National Forest, 701 Camino del Rio, Durango, CO 81301, (970) 247-4874. Durango Chamber Resort Assn., P.O. Box 2587, Durango, CO 81302, (970) 247-0312 or (800) 525-8855. Silverton Chamber, P.O. Box 565, Silverton, CO 81433, (970) 387-5654 or (800) 752-4494. Ouray County Chamber, P.O. Box 145, Ouray, CO 81427, (970) 325-4746 or (800) 228-1876.
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| The drive: The San Juan Mountains, an immense 12,000-square-mile slice of high country, encompasses almost all of southwestern Colorado. The San Juans, with a mean elevation of 10,000 feet, boasts over one hundred peaks topping 13,000 feet and fourteen of Colorado's fifty-four 14,000-foot peaks. This huge range, dissected by sharp canyons and spiked with sky-scraping peaks, is divided into numerous sub-ranges including the San Miguel Range, Rico Mountains, La Plata Mountains, Sneffels Range, West Needle and Needle Mountains, Grenadier Range, La Garita Mountains, and Cochetopa Hills. The heart of the San Juans, however, is the San Juan Range itself, towering above the historic mining towns of Ouray, Silverton, and Lake City. The Million Dollar Highway, following US 550, traverses this rugged, rocky heartland for eighty-seven miles from Durango over 10,910-foot Molas Divide to Silverton and 11,008-foot Red Mountain Pass to Ouray and Ridgway.
The highway, open year-round, is best driven in summer and fall. The wide variation in elevation along the drive from 6,512 feet at Durango to 11,018 feet atop Red Mountain Pass gives a wide diversity of both temperature and precipitation. Summer temperatures in the lower elevations at both ends of the road are typically warm, with highs ranging from 70 to 90 degrees. The mountain heights are cooler. Highs range from 50 to 70 degrees. Afternoon thunderstorms are an almost daily occurrance somewhere along the highway. Watch for slippery roads. Autumn is delightful, with cool, crisp days and spectacular aspen colors.
The first snow falls sometime in October on the high peaks, and winter begins in November with heavy snowfall. As much as four feet of snow can fall in a day, leading to extreme avalanche danger. The highway regularly closes due to avalanches. The steep Uncompahgre Gorge highway section between Ironton Park and Ouray is the most dangerous, with the Riverside and Mother Cline slides. The Riverside Slide, dropping 3,200 vertical feet down abrupt chutes, makes this highway Colorado's deadliest avalanche crossing. Today a snowshed protects the road from the slide's wrath, but not before six highway travelers perished in avalanches. Chains are often required to drive the highway in winter. Watch for the omnipresent snowplows clearing the highway and bring extra clothes and sleeping bags in case of a breakdown. Spring comes slowly to the high country, with the snow cover slowly retreating on warm April and May days. Expect cool, breezy days with occasional snow and rain storms.
The Million Dollar Highway begins in Durango at the junction of U.S. highways 160 and 550. Turn north on US 550 on the town's south side. The road bypasses downtown Durango and heads up Main Avenue. Durango, straddling the broad Animas Valley, was established in 1880 as a Denver & Rio Grande Railroad town. Now the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, a National Historic and National Engineering Landmark, begins at the train station on the town's south side and runs north up the old Denver & Rio Grande railbed forty-five miles to Silverton. This spectacular train ride, threading through the steep Animas River gorge, is a living history exhibit that takes the traveler back in time to the railroad's mining heyday. Reservations and advance ticket purchases are advised, particularly during the busy summer months. Durango is also a wonderful outdoor sports town, with nearby mountain bike trails, excellent fly-fishing streams, numerous four-wheel-drive tracks, kayaking and rafting on the Animas River, and a wealth of hiking paths including the terminus of the 469-mile Colorado Trail between Durango and Denver. Durango also offers all visitor services, including hotels, dining, groceries, and service stations.
The highway leaves Durango after three miles and runs north on the western edge of the broad Animas Valley for fifteen miles. The Animas River, a 110-mile-long river originally called Rio de las Animas Perdidas, or River of Lost Souls, by early Spanish explorers, meanders in long graceful loops across the wide-bottomed valley past green pastures grazed by horses and cattle. Dense willows and tall narrow-leafed cottonwoods hug the river's rocky banks. The river did little to excavate this deep valley. Thick glaciers, spilling down from the high mountains, scoured the valley floor, chiseled its steep side-walls, and left a characteristic U-shaped valley behind. Sandstone cliffs abruptly lift from the valley, striping the slopes with diagonal bands.
As the highway runs north from Durango it passes Trimble Springs at six miles. This hot springs, located just west of the road, was named for 1874 settler Frank Trimble. He developed two springs, spewing water as hot as 126 degrees, and built a hotel for visitors wanting to sample the spring's "curative value." A new forty-room brick hotel, the Hermosa House, was erected in the late 1890s and offered stables, a gym, bowling alley, golf, and a saloon. After fire destroyed it in 1938, it was replaced by another hotel that burned in 1957. The springs now offers a bathhouse, Olympic-sized outdoor pool, and a smaller hot pool. Hermosa, an old stage and railroad stop, sits just north of Trimble. The town, settled in 1873 as a ranching center for the Animas Valley, now serves as a Durango bedroom community. The highway continues north, skirting the valley's steep wall, and reaches another historic site near the valley head. Baker's Bridge, designated by a state historical society bronze marker, crossed the Animas River here. Charles Baker and several men prospected through the San Juans in 1860, and, after working their way down from Baker's Park at today's Silverton, resolved to spend the winter in the northern Animas Valley. The party laid out a townsite, built rustic log cabins, and suffered through the cold winter. With news of the Civil War, they abandoned the site and returned East. Baker fought in the Confederate Army before Indians killed him while prospecting in 1868.
The flat valley abruptly ends, replaced by forested hills. The Animas River takes leave of the valley and bends northeast into a steep, cliffed gorge. The Million Dollar Highway also leaves the valley, bumping across the narrow gauge railroad tracks and climbing onto wooded slopes below the Hermosa Cliffs. A pullout sits just past the tracks and makes a good stop to watch the train pass by. A side road, La Plata County 75, drops east to a secluded glen and the remains of the old town Rockwood. This town served as the jumping-off point for miners and freighters heading north to Silverton and Rico. An old wagon toll road, now a National Historic Landmark, twisted north from here, with one branch following today's highway up to Purgatory and over Scotch Creek Pass to Rico and the other branch to Silverton.
The highway runs north below the cliffed escarpment and enters San Juan National Forest. Dense scrub oak thickets line the asphalt and beyond tower ponderosa pines and Douglas-firs. Tamarron, a year-round resort, offers golf on a stunning eighteen-hole course, tennis, swimming, and night skiing on a beginner hill. The road swings past Haviland Lake, a small lake tucked below in thick forest. Haviland Lake Campground, with forty-five sites, sits on its east shore. Three-mile-long Electra Lake, created for electric power, lies to the north. The highway sweeps across a high bench through dense aspen groves. Engineer Mountain, its talus flanks broken by cliff bands, looms to the north and the West Needle Mountains rise roughly to the northeast. Castle Rock, a castellated promontory, juts from the Hermosa Cliffs at twenty-five miles. The road becomes four-lane and reaches Purgatory Ski Area. This popular destination ski resort boasts over three hundred inches of dry powder and thirty-five miles of runs spread over 630 acres. Fifteen miles of groomed cross-country ski trails thread the surrounding woodlands. Purgatory Campground, with fourteen sites, sits just east of the drive.
The highway drops back to two-lanes, crosses Cascade Creek below 12,968-foot Engineer Mountain, and begins steeply ascending above Mill Creek. The blacktop switchbacks through a spruce forest sprinkled with aspen. Potato Hill rises to the east and beyond towers 13,158-foot Twilight Peak in the West Needle Mountains, its rocky flanks chiseled by glaciers into deep cirques, sharp aretes, and flying buttresses. After eight miles the highway emerges on Coal Bank Summit, a 10,640-foot saddle between Engineer Mountain and Potato Hill. The pass name is a misnomer; the apparent coal seams are actually thin shale layers.
The drive winds down from the summit, crosses Deer Creek, and swings up aspen-covered slopes. Most of the rolling country adjoining the highway was consumed in a 26,000-acre forest fire in 1879. Civic groups later replanted much of the Lime Creek Burn. After bending over West Lime Creek, the highway turns east and climbs alongside East Lime Creek. The creek trickles in a shallow valley, with aspens coating the warm south-facing slopes and dense spruce woods blanketing the cooler north-facing hillsides. East Lime Creek Rest Site sits on the east side of the highway. Park here to hike south to Andrews Lake, a popular trout lake. The road continues up East Lime Creek and a mile and a half later reaches 10,910-foot Molas Pass.
Molas Pass yields one of Colorado's most stunning mountain panoramas. Sharp peaks spike the horizon in a wide circle from the summit. The Needle and Grenadier mountains tower to the east, their ragged flanks are strewn with glacier-carved buttresses and cirques, and their pointed summits rip passing clouds. The Animas River gorge, an abrupt forested chasm, hides between the pass and the peaks. Molas Lake, its placid waters reflecting the sky, tucks into a hollow on a broad bench above the canyon. Spruce forest and open willow meadows surround the lake. Snowdon Peak, the 13,077-foot northern outpost of the West Needle Range, looms to the south. Rounded ridges, green with above-timberline tundra grass and broken by rocky crags on the skyline, stairstep up west from the pass. Molas Lake, owned by Silverton and operated by a private concessionaire, offers camping, picnicking, and fishing. Good day hikes are found on the Colorado Trail at Molas Pass.
The highway descends sharply for five miles from Molas Lake to Silverton, clinging to steep mountainsides above the Animas River. Thick spruce forest hems in the road, with open slopes offering glimpses north into broad Baker's Park. Finally the road makes a couple hairpin turns, reaches the valley floor, and bends west up Mineral Creek. A right turn here leads to the picturesque mining camp of Silverton. A visitor center, housed in an ornate building, sits on the south edge of town. Silverton, at an elevation of 9,320 feet, stretches along the Animas River in Baker's Park, a flat two thousand-acre glacial valley encircled by a wall of mountains. Winter blankets the town, one of Colorado's most isolated settlements, with over three hundred inches of annual snowfall. Before modern snow-removal equipment, Silverton was often cut off from the outside world for weeks at a time; even now the Million Dollar Highway shuts down for a few days each winter. The town is undeniably a tough place to live -- the year-round average temperature is a mere 35.6 degrees and summer's frost-free growing season may be as short as twelve days. Towering peaks ring Baker's Park, with 13,370-foot Sultan Mountain to the south, 13,068-foot Kendall Mountain on the east, and 13,487-foot Storm Peak to the north.
At its peak Silverton boasted over thirty mills, two smelters, thirty-seven saloons, and numerous card houses, opium dens, and "pleasure palaces" on its infamous Blair Street.
Silverton today is a quaint village that wears its colorful history well. Most of the town, preserved as a National Historic District, still reflects the mining heyday of a century ago. It appears at first glance like a movie set with false-fronted buildings, opulent Victorian homes, the gold-domed county courthouse, the 1903 brick jail that houses the San Juan County Historical Society Museum, and rustic miners' cabins. The town is also the northern terminus of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, the last vestige of Silverton's railway glories. Several hotels dot the town, including the landmark Grand Imperial Hotel.
The drive bends west from Silverton on US 550 and heads up Mineral Creek Valley. The North Star Mine and Mill, surrounded by quaking aspens, sits across the creek just west of town. Forest Road 585 turns off the highway and heads west up Mineral Creek's South Fork in a broad, glaciated valley for five miles to twenty-three-site South Mineral Campground. This 9,800-foot campground makes a good base camp for exploring the surrounding high peaks and basins. Ice Lake Basin, three miles to the west, sits amid sheer cliffed peaks including 13,894-foot Vermillion Peak and 13,738-foot Pilot Knob. The highway scales the valley's gentle north flank through mixed aspen and spruce forest and after a couple miles swerves into a valley carved by glaciers and the Middle Fork of Mineral Creek. Numerous avalanche chutes slice through the forest on the steep valley sides.
The Ophir Pass Road, beginning about five miles west of Silverton, takes off from US 550, crosses Burro Bridge, and climbs steeply for four miles to the 11,750-foot summit. The track, one of the area's easier four-wheel-drive routes, continues down the old stage and wagon road six miles to Ophir and Colorado Highway 145. The drive heads up the valley to the foot of Red Mountain Pass and the old 1883 townsite of Chattanooga. While almost nothing remains now, the town once housed three hundred residents and seventy-five buildings. A fire and disastrous snow slides wrecked the town.
The highway, traversing the old Silverton Railway's right-of-way, turns west onto the Chattanooga Loop and begins the final three-mile ascent to the summit of Red Mountain Pass. The blacktop, with no guardrail, edges shelf-like along precipitous slopes. Look down the valley for great views of Bear Mountain. Note the forest shape on its flank that appears to be a giant bear licking a honeycomb. The highway bends into a steep gorge, passes the remains of the Silver Ledge Mine, and climbs atop 11,018-foot Red Mountain Pass. Abandoned buildings of the Longfellow Mine and a small, willow-lined tarn sit on the summit. The dangerous, one-way Black Bear Road climbs west from here to Ingram Pass and down to Telluride.
The Million Dollar Highway between Silverton and Ouray follows an old toll road that was started in 1880 and finished in 1884 by road builder and transportation magnate Otto Mears. The road operated as a mail, stage, and freight line until Mears opened his Rainbow Route railway from Silverton to the rich mines at the summit of Red Mountain Pass. The Million Dollar Highway, traversing the old rail and wagon route, was completed in 1924. The road section from Ouray to Red Mountain Pass cost about a million dollars to build, which gave the highway its name.
The highway plunges down from the pass summit twelve miles to Ouray. The first section, a maze of switchbacks and hairpin turns, twists down steep slopes to Ironton Park. Just north of the summit the highway passes the mostly abandoned Idarado Mine, one of this century's largest producers.
Red Mountain Creek meanders through broad Ironton Park. Aspens blanket the mountainsides above, creating a stunning display of color in late September. The old mining town of Ironton sat near the valley head. After a couple miles the highway leaves the valley and drops into the Uncompahgre Gorge, a deep canyon sliced by the Uncompahgre River. The gorge is simply spectacular. The road angles across steeply tilted cliffs of quartzite, slate, and schist, and scree slopes.
The highway edges north and passes Forest Road 878, the start of the four-wheel-drive Alpine Loop Back Country Byway. Further north the road, clinging to cliffs, crosses Bear Creek Falls. The creek cascades 227 feet down to the river below. The tollgate for Otto Mears' road sat at this narrow site so wagon trains couldn't avoid paying the $3.75 toll for a vehicle with two animals. A nearby monument remembers Mears and his contribution to Colorado history. The drive runs through a short tunnel and emerges at Lookout Point above Ouray. A vast amphitheater of cliffs, formed by volcanic San Juan Tuff, soars above the town to lofty peaks and sharp ridges. Amphitheater Campground, with thirty-three sites, is reached from a side-road past the viewpoint. The highway snakes down into Ouray.
Mountains dominate Ouray. The town, named for a famed Ute chief, sits cupped in a deep canyon. Three waterfalls thunder within shouting distance of Ouray and five creeks dash through town to the Uncompahgre River. Box Canyon, on the southwest edge, is most impressive with Canyon Creek roaring through a narrow gorge. Geothermal hot springs dot the Ouray, filling pools and bathhouses. The springs, named Uncompahgre or hot water springs by the Utes, still attracts visitors to Ouray, which locals call the "Switzerland of America." A legacy of old mining roads lace the mountains and canyons, making Ouray the jeep capitol of America. Some of the best roads are the Corkscrew Road, Poughkeepsie Gulch, Engineer Pass, Yankee Boy Basin, and Imogene Pass. Jeep rentals are available in town. Numerous trails also thread the backcountry, climbing to waterfalls, alpine basins, and sheer peaks. The Ouray Hot Springs Pool, on the north end of town, gives a relaxing soak at day's end. The town, a National Historic District, offers neat streets lined with restored Victorian homes, brick buildings, the haunted Beaumont Hotel, the Ouray County Historical Museum, and a designated walking tour.
The drive's last ten miles connect Ouray to Ridgway, an old railroad hub. The highway runs through a narrow gap lined with towering sandstone walls and takes leave of the San Juan Mountains. The broad glacier-carved valley ahead, flanked by forested slopes, is lush with green pastures, grazing cattle, and immense narrow-leaf cottonwoods. Herds of elk and deer graze in roadside meadows, particularly from late fall to spring. The drive yields great vistas of the ragged Sneffels Range to the west, low-browed Grand Mesa to the north, and Chimney and Courthouse peaks on the east. The drive ends in Ridgway at the intersection of US 550 and Colorado Highway 62.
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