First day in Colorado

A lot of the time, when people think about Colorado, they think of snow-capped mountains and skiing. This isn’t really fair since for half the year in most of the state, not only is there no snow, it’s actually pretty temperate, like our home state of PA. Given that our first day in Colorado was in the beginning of September, we were not really thinking we would see much snow. We were wrong. As we crossed into the state on the plane from DC, we could see the storm below us. It was a little early for them, but not as strange as it would have been on the east coast. Our decent into Denver, shown in the clip below, was just a taste of what we were about to have to drive through for the next couple hours.

Neither of us had flown anywhere in years. We had flown from Harrisburg to a short layover in DC before heading to Denver, so we didn’t see much of Dulles since our gates were pretty close together. And since Covid had closed most of DC, we pretty much just found a seat in the terminal and stared out the window. So for all intents and purposes, DIA was the first large airport either had to navigate. Luckily we only had carry-ons, so we didn’t have to pick up any bags, American Airlines was pretty liberal with the carry-on limits. It was a little bit of a strange experience since all over the news back in September, COVID was raging through the country and everyone was supposed to be so scared and taking all these precautions. Not to say that everyone, everywhere we went didn’t wear masks, they did. But social distancing at the airport was thrown right out the window. There wasn’t much choice. We had both been in some pretty major airports in the past, and although the news was screaming at the time how no one was to travel, it didn’t seem like anyone listened. It was maybe a little lighter than I’ve seen at an airport like Orlando, but we were there on a Monday during a pandemic… Neither of us was too worried about it though, as much as the world wanted us to be, so off to pick up our truck through the masses.

The Enterprise car rental operation at DIA was pretty impressive, it seemed like a hundred vehicles would come in and out of that place every hour. And other than the line at the desk, they were pretty damn efficient. We had specified a 4x4 truck ahead of time and were given a nice, new Ram 1500 with the big hemi engine. Coincidentally, it even had PA plates. It was a beast to get out the parking lot, but we were glad to have a huge, capable vehicle given the conditions we were about to drive through, along with what we knew we would be putting it through for the next two weeks.

The Rental Ram at Steamboat Lake

Our first glimpse of the Rockies. We should have known then the snow we would run into…

After being in either an airport or an airplane for most of the day, and the lack of any restaurants being open in the airports because of the virus, we were looking forward to getting something to eat as our first stop. We decided that we could make it a bit out of Denver before we stopped in the little town of Idaho Springs. One of the reasons we picked this small town on I 70 was that it had a pizza shop called Beau Jo’s, which was suggested to us by a friend back home as a place to go up in Steamboat. There actually ended up a lot of towns in CO have a Beau Jo’s, and for good reason. Although you can get pizza anywhere, it was pretty good and pretty unique. It was a nice place in a nice little town… and they served alcohol.

As we sat there eating and drinking for the first time in Colorado, the snow was picking up.

After filling up on pizza, we jumped back in the truck and headed west on 70 to meet up with 40, which would take us right up to Steamboat Springs. We weren’t on 70 long before we hit 40. And once we were on 40, we started to climb. And as we started to climb, the snow really started to fall…

I know it says show instead of snow… I made this video that night at the hotel and I guess my hands were still a little shaky from driving

If we would have been making this drive the day before, this would have been a beautiful trip. But we didn’t. We had snow and ice, it was 16 degrees at the top. We were up and down mountains for hours in the snow. At first there were pretty many other vehicles around us, but they thinned out as we went. The locals knew to call it, but we had to get to Steamboat that night.

It was a little crazy to drive through the mountains like this for so long, but we had driven through snow before and we had a big truck to do it in. There really was never a time where we were worried, although we found out after we were through the mountain passes that they had closed the roads shortly after we got through. We got lucky there, if they would’ve closed them an hour earlier, we would have had no place to go.

The snow let up quite a bit as we dropped elevation, uncovering some really spectacular views of freshly covered mountains.

Yes I ran along the side of the road to take this picture. It’s called dedication

We arrived at our hotel in Steamboat Springs after dark. The storm had been there as well. We found out later that where we had a low grade blizzard in the mountains, they had the highest winds that anyone could remember, with gusts up to 100 mph. I found that hard to believe, but heard it from a couple people. And the trees laying everywhere you looked, snapped like twigs, did corroborate their stories. Luckily we missed those winds, and they still weren’t cleaned up in Steamboat Springs by the time we left three days later. Shortly after we made the pass they closed the road for the night.