X88 expeditions - Documenting and sharing overland travels, adventures, and expeditions

September 18, 2007

Colorado Expedition - Day 6 - Sep 14 - Part I

Durango is a bustling town south-west of the San Juan Mountains. Lots of offroad ready vehicles around as its close to a wealth of adventures. Its also where the R&D / fabrication headquarters is to Fab Fours which are the manufacturers of my replacement bumper. Now, they don't make a specific bumper for the Trailblazer but the one for the Toyota FJ worked out great (with a little tweaking of the mounting brackets by National 4WD). I was considering contacting them to see if they would be interested in taking a look at how their product was adapted, but again, time considerations stopped that idea. Today I was off to a couple of trails that are only in the smaller size Colorado Trails books, that is, the ones that have the additional trails documented. The ones close to Durango that interested me were the Columbus Mine and Kennebec Pass trails. I usually prefer loop-type trails where you don't come back the same way you arrived but these looked interesting in the Southwest Region book so I decided to give them a shot. They both start from the same access road heading into the La Plata range and the San Juan National Forest. The road soon turns to gravel, then becomes much rougher with medium size embedded rocks.
At a certain point I took the turn off to the Columbus Mine side of the trail and started up the switch-backs which are very wide and not a problem to navigate. The trail is still rated a 4 out of 10 as the shelf road is somewhat narrow (1 vehicle only) and fairly steep.
There is a closed gate before the end of the trail where there is an abandoned mine entrance so I parked the Trailblazer at the turn-around spot. I believe that there is too much falling rock to allow vehicles past this point. So I put on my hiking boots and slowly walked over, again, being careful of not being used to the altitude which the guide says is 11,647 feet here.
A couple of views of the mine entrance.
Looking back at the turn-around area. Can you spot the Trailblazer?
Once I was back to the vehicle, I took some shots of some more mining equipment nearby. I thought of hiking up there to take a closer look but I had one more trail to go so I decided not to.
From the mine entrance area I could see another vehicle starting up the switch-backs to get to the mine. However, they stopped at the last one before the final climb up to the turn around area and decided to head back. Too bad, I would have liked to say HI.
Some final shots after I turned around.
And finally a shot from the Trailblazer of the trail back down (to the right) and of the hiking trail to the mine entrance on the other side of Columbus Basin. The most difficult thing I had get used to are the drop-offs from the shelf road, which in this case where quite substantial. Otherwise the Trailblazer handled the inclines and surface well as the Mickey Thompsons were solid. Oh, and I also had to get used to long stretches of driving (crawling) in 4LO - 1st gear. The Trailblazer has a 2.7:1 LO gear in the transfer case so its actually not bad at all. The drive up to Kennebec Pass (rated 5!) next post ...

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