Last Dollar Road

If you'll remember, I told you I discovered Last Dollar Road on Google Earth, where someone had posted (and labled) a couple of very nice pictures which gave me the notion that I'd like to see what I could find up there. So, after cruising Main Street, I took the Airport Road up onto the mountain and found Last Dollar Rd just where it was supposed to be. Little traffic and lovely views.

If you look closely at the first three pictures, you'll see they were all taken of the same ridge and from the same general direction - if not the same spot in the road. Picture No.1 was taken looking north, along a fenceline toward a pair of pleasantly imposing tors with lines of aspens running down the slope in front. The fenceline and the lines of trees move your attention across the lower half of the picture in contrast to the mutually reinforcing masses of the two mountains.

In picture No. 2 the viewpoint has shifted around to the left as I moved farther along Last Dollar Rd. Note the two peaks from the previous picture are no longer perfectly aligned and neighboring peaks now share the spotlight. Note also that the sky has become more interesting as the afternoon clouds continue to increase. The fenceline might have been added simply for visual interest, considering the break with no gate and the fact that it seems to just stop 200 ft down the road [actually, it continues on, but curves back to the right, hidden by the slope]. In any case, it works fine for my purposes.

No. 3 was taken from the same location; I just shifted the focus to the right slightly. The clouds here are closer and somewhat more substantial than in the previous shots, giving me hope that before the day is out I'd have some much more interesting skies. I knew from an earlier trip that once I get out to Utah [the following day], where the scenery is monumental but visual detail is often baked out of pictures by an unrelenting sun, I was likely to need some interesting skies to help out my "rock shots".

Well, it's May so the snow is melting and, though the rivers were all running high, I didn't see as many streams washing down off the mountain as I had expected. Here's a nice, full, noisy one coming down, running under Last Dollar Rd and making its way south to join the San Miguel.