My plan was to do Black Bear Pass, Holy Cross, Poughkeepsie Gulch and Imogene Pass. Well, Black Bear Pass was a nothing burger, closed hopefully only for the season, but likely forever. Shit.
As I posted on Tuesday, the San Miguel County Sheriff wasn’t able to get Black Bear Pass open for the season, I decided to do Imogene Pass on Friday, Holy Cross on Saturday, and Poughkeepsie Gulch on Sunday.
The trip from home to the Ouray KOA was about 925 miles, via US-287 N and I-40 W. Nothing exciting happened, so I did the tourist thing and took pictures of the state crossings.
Along the way I stopped at a Camping World to get my 5 gallon propane bottle topped off. There were 8 employees hanging out near the entrance, but the counter person told me they had nobody available to do it. I guess filling a propane bottle requires some sort of certification. I ended up filling it at the KOA. Along the way I saw my first wet microburst. It lasted less than a minute but it was unbelievable.
Along the trip I stopped at some landmark “restaurants” that weren’t really restaurants, but due to historic zoning laws, the businesses couldn’t change the signs. Believe it.
A Bugatti Veyron went past me. It wasn’t speeding, but it caught me by surprise. What I didn’t know was that it is owned by Ralph Lauren, and that he has a sprawling property in the area named Double RL Ranch. Most of the locals that I spoke to told me “Ralph has two of those”.
I guess they don’t know about his 1938 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic. Apparently only four were ever made, and only two are known to exist today. The other one does not have matching numbers and was sold at auction for around $30-40 million.
The one Ralph owns does have matching numbers. A prominent classic car expert stated “it would sell for a terrifying $100 million or more”. I doubt Ralph drives that one around.
I found a cool feature in the Uconnect navigation unit. As is the case with all devices that have true GPS (not A-GPS that Apple and other companies try to fool their customers into believing is true GPS), it has a GPS summary screen that shows you how many satellites you’re locked into, signal strength for each one, coordinates, and elevation.
I reserved a primitive camp spot, since I have an off grid power kit and a 2.5 gallon water can in the Jeep. I was expecting a gravel “pad”, but got grass instead. It took 10 minutes to set up the tent. Then I fed Koda, cooked dinner, washed and put away all the kitchen stuff, reorganized the stuff in the Jeep, then I headed to the shower.
I learned that Koda doesn’t like being in my tent. He was happier in the Jeep. Since the temperature was in the 70s, I didn’t have to worry about him being too hot or cold. I got to sleep around 10PM.
I can’t wait to get my iKamper repaired. Once that happens, I’ll just need a hand mounting it before every trip, since it has to be schlepped outside (garage clearance is only 7′). I’ll be fine using my tent for now.
I was hoping to post video or pictures of a (brown) Black Bear we drove past. It was going through someone’s trash cans. I asked Siri to record the precise time, so I can grab the footage. But the BlackVUE dash cam that I have only has the 32 gigabyte MicroSD card, so the clip was overwritten.
I also came close to hitting a deer, but thanks to my Jeep’s heavy duty brakes, I has no problem stopping in time. It went back into the woods. Same issue, the footage was overwritten. I should have pulled over to download the clip, like I did when Ralph went by in his Bugatti. Oh well.
Tomorrow we’ll do Imogene Pass.
Overlander at large 