6/27 Trip to Crested Butte

To get to Lakeview campground near the Taylor Reservoir means leaving the main highway and driving 15 miles through an open valley filled with ranches, a narrow canyon along a river, and finally to the wide valley of the reservoir with the high mountains not too far away.  The paved road ends just down the road, but you can go over a couple of passes on dirt roads if you choose.  (I don't!)

However, today I decided to go out to visit the nearby town of Crested Butte.  Crested Butte is a small resort town about 30 miles from here.  Getting there means driving back out of the valley to the main road and then heading north.  The reservoir was very calm this morning when I left, so the mountains in the distance make a pretty reflection.

Here is the wider valley of the main road.

 

And here is the  town itself.  Very pretty place with some interesting shops.  This week is a special mountain bike week, with multiple races and events. 

And just one of the incredible mountains near the town.

Heading back to the campground, I noticed some cowboys on horses and cows in the woods alongside the road.  Apparently, around here, they move the cows around from pasture to pasture depending on the time of year.  About a mile farther along, I ran into an unsupervised herd that was walking on the road. They really had no place else to go since the mountain was steep on one side and the river was on the other side.

At first, I tried to move into the left lane to pass them, like the car in the photo above.  I then saw other cars approaching in the distance, so I moved back into my own lane and followed the animals at cow-speed, which is very slow.  Yellow center lines apparently do not mean much to them.

I finally let another car pass me and decided to follow close on their bumper.  In this last photo, you can see that the cows in the lead had found a place where they could head up into the woods along a less steep slope.  It took about a mile of this parade to get past the herd.

I will have to admit that it was cute to see each calf working to keep up with its mom.

They are building a chain link fence with barbed wire on top of it around this campground because of problems in the past with cows and even a bull wandering through the campsites.  It will not be done for a few weeks, however.