Well, this little sojourn of mine certainly became a whole lot more interesting yesterday than I’d been expecting. If any of y’all have ever driven US 550 from New Mexico into Colorado, you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about. From Bernalillo, NM, to the Colorado border, US 500 is a nice, lightly-trafficked four-lane highway. As soon as you get into Colorado, though, the road narrows to two lanes, and things become very interesting very quickly.
I stopped for lunch in Durango and then headed up into the mountains. The trip up to Coal Bank Pass, at 10,640 feet above sea level, was relatively uneventful. It was like a lot of highways through the Cascades in Oregon and Washington that I’ve driven for years. Once I got over the pass, though, it was like reaching the crest on a roller coaster. All of a sudden, I was on this narrow, shoulderless two-lane road headed straight down. Even more disconcerting than the lack of a shoulder was that there’s no railing to separate a driver from a drop of a couple thousand vertical feet. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the road and not on the vertical drop just a few short feet away.
From Coal Bank Pass though Silverton and all the way to Ouray, I spent the better part of two hours thinking “So, just how many people HAVE gone over the edge?” The scenery was breathtaking, but I found it difficult to fully appreciate the beauty of the San Juan Mountains when I was fully occupied with trying not to take the express lane to the bottom of some nameless canyon. I mean, Jeebus, how many people have to go over the edge before someone comes up with the bright idea of putting up a guardrail? At one point, I got a call on my cell phone. I answered it and said, “I can’t talk now; I’m about to die….” Thankfully, I lived to tell about it, and yes, it was a breathtakingly beautiful ride. I just wish I could have more fully appreciated it. Then again, I was pretty much fully occupied with not dying to appreciate my surroundings.
I will say one thing, though; driving through mountains like that certainly makes me realize just how truly small and insignificant an individual human is by comparison.
