Day 6 - Friday Sept 14 - Part 1
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. 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 carefull of not being used to the altitude which the guide says is 11,647 feet here.