Leaving Gunnison, heading east

On Monday, we left Thousand Trails Blue Mesa Recreational Ranch on our way to continue east...

The site we were leaving at Blue Mesa

We drove east through Gunnison (we had visited Gunnison multiple times during our 15 day stay)...

Heading east out from Gunnison

We knew that we'd be climbing...

... heading up into the mountains...

... past 10,000 feet (Carl said that when an airplane is going over 10,000 feet it must have oxygen onboard... we have no O2!).

Continuing up...

We got to Monarch Pass, 11,000'+

Gracie was glad to stop and rest!

We were glad to get out and walk around!

Another visitor offered to take our picture -- we were on the Continental Divide - I was on the Pacific side, and Carl was on the Atlantic side.

Inside the visitor center / gift shop was a map of The Colorado Trail (https://coloradotrail.org/trail/) -- I'm pointing at our current location. In this area, The Colorado Trail and The Continental Divide Trail run in the same path.

Time to head down! It is looking stormy up ahead!

Looked like a mining operation on our way down -- based on where I think we were, it was either Great Monarch Mine (lead) or Madonna Mine (lead, silver, zinc).

We were now in a valley area -- I thought it would be called the central valley, but it seems that this is considered the front range, eastern side of the continental divide.

We were on our way to our stop for the night, an Observatory  at an over 9000' elevation. More about this in the next post!