For a few reasons we decided to leave a day later. One of the several benefits was making the drive in daylight: the climb to Bailey, over Kenosha Pass into South Park, a break for lunch in Jefferson or Fair Play, at a diner cum general store cum post office. Resolved: to stop thinking of Colorado as Denver plus a stretch of interstate to the regular ski mountains or another stretch of smaller roads to Rocky Mountain National Park. Also: to take better advantage of knowing how much more to Colorado there is.
I had seen South Park a few times before, the remarkable flats leading back to the plains and the long drop down, Mt. Elbert looming in the distance. This time we didn't turn toward Salida (an exit from the mountains) but west toward Monarch. I might have done better with blinders on: Monarch Pass was scary. But in that case I would have missed the snow.
Prosaic as I am, when I look around to these small towns, the homesteads without the towns, I wonder about their fresh produce. Weekly or monthly mail I can figure. If only monthly, though, do they get tomatoes and spinach and asparagus only monthly as well?
After four hours of painted horses, parched, sage-covered hills, creeks a-jump and a-burble, foothills and mountains, we reached Crested Butte. On almost every postcard I wrote that this was the most beautiful bit of Colorado I had ever seen, and that was true because I hadn't seen Telluride yet.
One of the things I miss here is forests, both their presence and their views. I've always preferred deciduous to coniferous trees in general, but somehow I knew the problem with Colorado forest wasn't just that they're mostly evergreen. Here in southwestern Colorado, the forests appealed to me much more, and I immediately saw why. More moisture means more deciduous, more aspen and cottonwood (including my favorite, redolent narrow-leaf black willow), but also more Colorado blue spruce instead of the drier eastern slopes' Ponderosa and lodgepole pine: the green of the forest is more blue than yellow. It was soothing to the eye (like poppies).
Crested Butte is in two parts: Crested Butte, full of Victorian, mining-era buildings, with shoppes (pronounced "shoppies," natch) and galleries and restaurants, and Mt. Crested Butte, nothing but ski condos and hotels, three miles north and directly under the eponymous mountain.
Geographically, I'm not sure what the difference is between a butte and a mountain or a butte and a mesa, but I know a mountain and a mesa aren't the same. Crested Butte is relatively independent, descending to the valley floor on all sides instead of being one peak of many (butte not mountain), and it's not flat on top (butte not mesa) even where it's not crested (like a cockatiel or a dinosaur, take your pick).