By the time we rounded up all the Jeeps and headed out there were 13 in our caravan. That’s a lot of people to be herding around. Our leaders today were Dana and Debra but we didn’t hear what the name of their party would be.
We headed south out of Breckenridge to Alma and then turned off on Mosquito Pass road. At the town council meeting back in the 1870’s, the councilmen could not decide on a name for their town so they decided to close the ledger and discuss it again the next week. When they opened the ledger there was a dead mosquito on the line of the ledger where they were going to write the name. So they chose ‘Musquito’.
The road took us past both the North and South London Mines and up to just over 13,000’ elevation. This was the quickest route between Alma and Leadville where silver and gold were being mined. An itinerant minister used to travel that route to deliver mail, gold and the message, sometimes twice in one day but once it took him three days in deep snow. One story tells how he saved a stage coach full of people stuck in snow on the pass.
It was a fairly easy road except for one spot where a boulder had partially blocked the road. We squeezed through the gap with no scratches but a few other caravaners were not so lucky. One guy lost a fender and another poked a hole in the bumper of his rental Jeep. It was a BIG rock!
We lunched at the Leadville Fish Hatchery then headed home past Ski Cooper and Copper Mountain Ski Resorts.
No comments:
Post a Comment