At 11,312 feet above sea level Monarch Mountain Pass on Route 50 is one of the most dangerous roads in America.
I did not know this when I drove it, but I did know that it was an awfully curvy, awfully high, and awfully spectacularly beautiful road to drive.
As I summited the Pass, I began to suspect something might be important about this stretch of Route 50 when I saw people taking pictures of one another in front of the Monarch Mountain Pass sign at the summit.
That suspicion grew towards certainty when, about a mile down from the summit, I passed an upside down tractor trailer that had flipped over taking the left hand curve too fast and had slid a short way down the embankment.
The certainty became conviction when I googled it and watched a YouTube video about Monarch Pass, but by then I was safely down and off the mountain and in a motel for the night because it was forecast to be too cold to camp.
I spent two nights in Colorado.
The first was in La Junta at the very first KOA campground I’ve ever been in and, like the first of anything, will probably be the most memorable. As I was checking in, I was noticing a lot of tarantula-themed merchandise for sale. There was even a large rock paperweight with a painting of a tarantula on it on the counter and when I asked the girl about it, she told me that every September there is a tarantula festival in La Junta because the tarantulas totter into town to mate.
My second night was in Montrose at the Minecart Motor Lodge. I had called earlier in the day when I’d stopped for gas because Mr. ChatGPT told me it got great reviews and the price wasn’t too bad. So I booked it. But as I drove into Montrose I passed a couple of motels that looked really nice and I hoped that Minecart Motor Lodge would look as nice.
It didn’t. In fact, as I drove by it, it looked like the kinda place that might rent rooms by the hour. I even tried to weasel out of the reservation so that I could stay in one of the other, nicer-looking motels.
But I couldn’t and I didn’t and it turns out I was wrong. Come to find out, the Minecart Motor Lodge has new owners and they are renovating the motel from the rooms out. The rooms are really nice. Simple, but really nice. And they don’t rent by the hour.
So Colorado gave me a spectacularly dangerous road to drive, my first KOA experience, and a reminder NOT to judge a book (or a place) by it’s cover.
Thanks, Colorado.
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