Wednesday, August 10, 2022    Durango, Colorado

We left Target Tree around 8 am this morning after refilling our water jugs.  Ate breakfast at the Durango Diner.  Tons of food came out on the plate.  Pretty good, but couldn’t eat it all.  Went to the Durango Rec Center and got a day pass for $6 so we could use the showers.  We have our shower products in one small nylon bag so we each have to go in separately to shower.  This works ok, since that leaves one person in the van to wait and we have no worries about leaving the van and all our gear.  

Next up is the laundromat and shopping for some odds and ends and then groceries.  Our fridge is very small, so we h ave to restrain ourselves while shopping and only buy a very few items that need refrigeration.

The laundromat was unusual.  Besides laundry machines, they had shower rooms as well.  Three dollars (in quarters) got you a 7 minute shower, bring your own towel.  The cost to use the machines was the highest yet – $4 per wash load, 5 minutes of drying per quarter.  Spent $15 on three loads.  

Heard (and even FELT) the train’s whistle when we were in downtown Durango as the narrow gauge steam train pulled out of town on its day-long trip to Silverton and back.  Dave and I took that train trip some years ago when we spent a week in Durango with brother Bob and sister-in-law Liz.

We saw unleaded regular gas for sale at $3.87 per gallon.  Lowest gas price we’ve seen this summer.

We left Durango and headed east on  Hwy 160, then north out of Bayfield and up to Vallecito reservoir.  There were a number of forest service campgrounds on the east side of the lake, but we didn’t stop.  It was like a long parking lot with the lake shore on one side of the camps and a busy county road on the other.  We kept going, away from the lake and up a wide canyon until the road turned to gravel.  There we found Pine River Campground.  As far as we could tell, there were only six camp sites.  Two of them had nowhere to park your vehicle.  Maybe you were supposed to use the Day Use lot nearby?  No signs to clarify that.  The big feature here was the wilderness trail head.  Many people had left cars and horse trailers in the parking lot so, presumably, they walked or rode the trail.  There were a lot of vehicles there for such a remote location.  There were 4 trucks with horse trailers and 12 cars.  

It was a strange little campground.  No water, no trash service, one vault toilet, but the scenery was amazing, so we stayed.    At one point a couple on horseback with two loaded pack horses came off the trail and loaded up into one of the horse trailers.  Clearly they had been back country camping down that trail.  

Another unusual feature about that place was a small group of what we thought were cows lying in a little bowl out in the meadow.  When they stood up, we realized that they had short horns like cattle, but also had long sweeping tails like horses.  We’re thinking maybe they were Yaks.

As people came off the trail with their horses and cow dogs, we were treated to a post-mortem of their ride as they called out to each other very loudly.  I guess they were used to shouting to be heard on the trail.