Sixty On The San Miguel

A Legal Rocky Mountain High

After Friday night camped along the South Fork, we spent Saturday, my 60th birthday, further north along the San Miguel River.  The river is flowing high and fast, after a winter with twice the average snowpack in the San Juan mountains. I had to keep Boie away because he would have been swept away. (photo above – interestingly, that posting on the tree on the left was not put there by Colorado Fish & Game – it was a “placer claim”. The same couple had posted the river downstream for over a mile.)

Before leaving town on Friday to avoid the weekend and upcoming bluegrass festival crowds, we stopped in at Telluride’s “Green Room” – “a recreational and medical marijuana dispensary” – to procure a 1 gram vial of legalized weed (about 4 buds) and get a Rocky Mountain High in the San Juan Mountains. It was quite an experience – although about 5 times more costly than the dope I smoked in college, it was far more potent.

As we left town, we noticed that the South Fork was running very muddy, so drove up a forest service road to try to locate what must have been a major landslide or washout of some sort – take a look how muddy the river was:

Compare that with a clear flowing tributary (look closely to see it flow into the brown muddy South Fork):

Drove maybe 10 miles upstream, but source of the problem was further upstream.

We expect to ramble around Colorado west of the great Divide for the month of June, before heading north to Montana and Glacier National Park.

We’ll keep you posted.