Cortez colorado scenery8/28/2023 Most of the back streets are still unpaved, flanked by authentic old houses. Silverton has many well preserved buildings from the 1870s, including the railway station, terminus of the steam trains from Durango. It is also rather commercial, catering especially to the upmarket biker community, and like all towns hereabouts has a strictly enforced 15 mph speed limit. From here the road descends a little, past trailheads to such places as Ice Lake Basin and Porphyry Basin, to Silverton, a similar historic town to Telluride but more interesting. The road peaks again at Red Mountain Pass, 11,018 feet, center of a mineralized area ( Red Mountain Mining District) with countless old silver and gold mines - several entire mountains here are deep red because of their high metal ore content, and all around are old shafts, spoil heaps, 4WD tracks and ruined wooden buildings, a colorful and unusual scene. On the right side is a long drop to the rocky canyon floor, where a stream rushes over large boulders and broken trees, residue from the spring snowmelt. South of Ouray the highway becomes rather precarious as it climbs sharply and winds across the face of near vertical slopes. CO 145 crosses the 10,222 foot Lizard Head Pass and drops down into the top end of the San Miguel River valley, which forms a box canyon since the upper end rises abruptly, surrounding the valley floor on three sides by high cliffs and crags, an inspiring setting for the historic town of Telluride. At lower elevations, the rocks are still sedimentary, red/orange in colour, as this region lies at the northeast corner of the Colorado Plateau, but at higher elevations these are replaced by the metamorphic rocks of the San Juan range. After Dolores, the highway, which is a wide, fast road most of the way, follows the wooded Upper Dolores River valley and gains height steadily while steep, rocky mountains of increasing height rise at either side. This canyon runs northwest for many miles and becomes much deeper, cutting into red layered rocks similar to those of the canyonlands of southeast Utah, and eventually meets the Colorado River near Moab. Starting at Cortez, the main town in Montezuma County in the southwest corner of Colorado, highway 145 begins to climb gently into the scrub covered San Juan foothills and soon arrives at Dolores, a small but lively town next to the Dolores River in quite a narrow ravine.
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