DAY 16: It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.......

July 19, 2011 - St. Elmo, Colorado
TEMP:  81 Degrees

WOW......what a RUSH of a day......GOLD Rush, that is!!!!

We decided to take our friend Georgia's recommendation and head west towards Saint Elmo, an old gold mining town established in 1880 and dissolved in 1926 with the exception of just a few members of the Stark family, and is now considered an awesome, well preserved ghost town.

The ride up was beautiful.....a river follows the road up to this unique town and then the road turns to oiled gravel for the last 7 miles or so.  We did the usual ghost town stuff; peeked in the windows, ate cookies on the steps of the church, fed the muskrats and looked for a see-through lady in a white dress (Annabelle Stark...the ghost).

As we were heading back, Liz came up with what seemed like a good idea at the time.....let's take a different road back to Buena Vista!  I checked the GPS and saw there was a "paved" road north of the road we came in on and convinced Chuck I knew what I was doing and that this was a terrific idea.  So, we made a quick u-turn and headed down my "terrific" road.......

After a few miles of really good dirt road, and still looking for that pavement according to my GPS, the road instead started taking on a look of "no-ones-been-on-this-road-since-1932" and I half expected to see Annabelle, the ghost, any second or a bear (especially after Chuck said "This sure looks like bear country to me."  At this point, I did give Chuck the opportunity to turn back......but  we had too much time already invested in this road and decided to push on.   The road continued to get worse and worse and we were dodging bolder rocks and could hear the bottom of the bike's oil pan dragging on some of the bigger rocks...........and that's when we saw it.  "It" being a cemetary.......

Iron City Cemetary is an amazing cemetary, as cemetaries go.  Out in the middle of nowhere, most of the people were buried here in the late 1800's and many were children....most likely died trying to make it up this road.  I left Chuck on the trike eating his Milk Duds as I went exploring all through this amazing sacred land of history.

I finally heard Chuck yelling to wrap it up, which meant he had finished his Milk Duds, and off we went  to even worse roads.  I know I must have apologized to Chuck no less than 50 times for getting us into this mess......At one point, he told me to take a picture "Up" of the sun, cause that might be the last time we would see it.....

We finally made it out of this mess I got us into and hit pavement again........Chuck actually wanted me to stop so he could kiss it........but I wouldn't.

As we made our way out of Mt. Princeton, where we had just spent a bumpy eternity in, I once again heard myself apologizing to my Charlie for such a dumb decision......He couldn't hear me though; he was now chomping on some almonds.