Colorado Adventure: Day Five -Mesa Verde to Ouray

Alpine Glow view from our camping cabin

We packed up camp and got out early, headed to Telluride. The plan was to eat some breakfast and ride the Gondola up to Mountain Village. We accomplished half the plan, but never got to the Gondola…seems I needed an ALTITUDE adjustment! Got a little altitude sickness after we had our yummy breakfast. Telluride is at over 8000 ft and you can feel it. Got a little dizzy, nausea, and felt like my head weighed 100 lbs. So, we decided the Gondola might be a bad idea! L. Found an herbal remedy to calm down the symptoms and got on the road down to a lower altitude in Ouray. Sort of. Ouray is around 7000 ft. ( I was wrong about Taos being at 9000 in my other post.) Taos is much lower. But, driving and looking at the unbelievable scenery into Ouray really helped. Had a little time to kill before checking into our camping cabin at Ouray Riverside Inn. So, we decided to drive 45 miles to Silverton on the Million Dollar Highway to kill some time. Roy was pretty tired of driving, so I took the helm. We got about 2 miles and had to turn back. Let me tell you, that road makes the Mt. Washington Auto Road seem like a little old curvy road through the mountains. I wigged. And with a thunder shower looming over the Mountain…I pulled over and made Roy drive us back into the valley. Roy was not enjoying being on the passenger side where he was much closer to the drop offs with no guard rails! It was ok though…the place we stopped to turn around ended up being a beautiful scenic overlook where we could walk to a waterfall. Gave us some time to calm and get up the nerve to get back in the car and head back. We headed to the Ouray Hot Springs Pool for more nerve calming. No pics of that, but it is a 103 degree natural spring fed public pool where you can dip or swim and just relax in the mineral spring waters. A giant hot tub, if you will. They mix the hot water with cold spring water and so you can swim in 78 degrees, lounge around in 93 degrees ( which was so fun to swim around in!) or soak in the 103 degree hot pool. A great way to end the day!