Colorado

Telluride and Silverton are just ten miles apart as the crow flies. By car, however, you have to drive around the entire mountain range on the San Juan Skyway.
Blue lights flashed behind us as we drove down the pass road towards the Ridgeway.

In artificially bad English, we explained to the sheriff that we were just following the other cars. But even that didn't help. He kindly insisted that we had been traveling around 5 miles per hour too fast. However, as a first-time offender in the state of Colorado, you are only due a warning, not a fine.

A huge steak with baked potato, salad, an appetizer and ice cream brownies for dessert, all for 12 dollars. This is exactly what dinner at a real Wild West ranch should look like. We found the ranch by chance on the side of the road in the small town of Montrose on the way from Crested Butte to Telluride. Well fortified, we finally tackled the last few miles to the old mining town in the middle of the mighty San Juan Mountains.

The drive in heavy snowfall from Aspen to Crested Butte is long and difficult. The route planner had indicated a good three hours in normal weather, but with 30 centimetres of fresh snow on completely uncleared mountain roads, it takes seven hours. Without four-wheel drive, this would probably have been a mission impossible. So once again it was midnight before we drove our jeep into the hotel garage.

Having already visited five ski resorts along the Powder Highway in British Columbia in the winter of 2009, this time we decided to tackle a road trip through the Wild West of Colorado. Fully equipped, we boarded the plane in Munich and landed a good 17 hours later in Grand Junction, in the west of the highest state in the USA.