Driving the Bachelor's Loop - Creede, Colorado

As part of our tour of Creede, we purchased a $2 "Bachelor Historic Tour" booklet at the Visitor's Center, and set off on a 17 mile drive through the mountains that surround the north end of town.  Creede is nestled in narrow Willow Creek Canyon, giving it impressively tall canyon walls.  The rock walls make for good picture backgrounds, and soon we'll be seeing the views from the top of those walls.
 
Not far from where we were standing was the first stop on our tour--the Creede underground firehouse. It took six years to chisel out an area big enough to house all the trucks and crew.  But a firehouse inside that canyon wall maintains a constant temperature of 50 degrees throughout the year.




Just a half mile down the road brought us to the ruins of the Commodore Mine.  The booklet describes this as "the most beautiful scene in Western American mining."  That might be a little dramatic, but it did make for a nice picture.

 At this point the road becomes very steep, and our car struggled up the bumpy gravel roads.  One section of this road is called "Black Pitch."  It was called the bone yard by the miners because of the number of horses and mules that were pushed to their death by heavy loads going down that hill.  Pulling loads down that steep grade in the winter was especially treacherous.

We passed more mines and old town sites along this road as we drove higher into the mountains.  But our favorite part of the tour was when we got to stop #6 in the booklet, which recommended a hike to the top of the Willow Creek Canyon wall.  The trail took us straight up a narrow jeep trail, and we got some good cardio exercise at this high altitude.  We didn't see any other foot prints on the trail, so it looks like most people miss out on these views.

The last half mile of the 1.6 mile hike is over loose stone that is both above and below the path.  We are carefully choosing each step, because this must be the rockiest hike we have ever taken.

But once you get to the end of the trail, you are at eye level with those grand canyon walls that were so far away in the first picture of this blog.

The views from the top were grand, all the way down to the valley below Creede.  To give some scale to the grandeur, you can barely see Denisa in her bright red blouse in the bottom left corner of the picture.

 That red blouse also shows up in the larger panorama picture of what we were seeing.

 From where we were perched, we could actually see down into both the West and East Willow Canyons.

As you can tell from all these pictures, the trees in parts of the canyons have been decimated by the pine bark beetles.  We took this picture of a beautiful twisted tree trunk, but we got all the ugly dead trees around it too.  It is sad to see that there are whole mountainsides that are now dead brown instead of healthy green.

Now it's time to head back over that long trail of loose rock.  You can just see Denisa on the left hand side of the picture before she rounds the curve into more rock.  But you can also see that some of the mountains ahead are still covered with those beautiful green trees that we no longer take for granted.

Since we have way too many pictures of Denisa on this trail, she has to include one of Mark sitting in the middle of some of those loose rocks covered with lime green lichen.  One of our favorite trail phrases these days is, "I'm likin' that lichen."

After our long walk back to the car, we continued on for the rest of our 17 mile driving tour.  The tour book described the mines that used to be high in these mountains, and even the towns that grew up overnight to support those mines.  But there isn't much left of them to see.  When we drove our way around to the other side of the canyon, we could now see the view of the town of Creede nestled in the valley from the opposite angle.

We could tell from the number of pictures taken, that the highlight of our driving tour was actually our hike.  We're afraid that too many people take this drive without experiencing the beauty from the top!

As we drove back down into Creede, we saw that people were settling into spots to watch the fireworks.  But it was two hours before dark, and we had watched South Fork's fireworks the night before.  We had left home eleven hours ago, and we were fading fast.  All this sight-seeing and fun can be really tiring!