Tag Archive for: Telluride

Telluride: Last Dollar Road Day Trip

The Day of the Last Dollar and Telluride

What an amazing day trip to Telluride! What started out as just a Last Dollar Road day trip also included discovering where Last Dollar Ranch was, the house in the John Wayne movie True Grit, Ralph Lauren’s Double R Ranch, Last Dollar Pass, Tom Cruise’s old neighborhood, the Telluride one runway regional airport and drinks on the roof of the Last Dollar Saloon. Oh yes, and an indescribable experience of a Mushroom Parade down the main street in Telluride! So unexpected, it left us speechless.

Why do a Last Dollar Road Day Trip?

First, let’s start with why we planned a Last Dollar Road day trip to begin with. Michelle has this book called Guide to Colorado Backroads & 4-Wheel Drive Trails and the first trail in the book is Last Dollar Road. It’s rated as an “easy” trail vs moderate or hard. We prefer to only do the easy trails in our Toyota Tacoma since we are new at this. The book describes the trail as…

“This scenic ranchland and forest backroad is a great alternative to the paved drive between Ridgway and Telluride. Enjoy abundant wildflowers through early summer, great fall color and stunning mountain views.”

It is a rutted dirt road suitable for high-clearance, 2-wheel-drive vehicles when dry. Slick clay makes it impassable when wet, even for 4-wheel-drive vehicles. We wanted to see the stunning views of this mining supply road built in the 1800’s so we added it to our list of places to see. Because the road is only open in the summer, we went in August.

Where is Last Dollar Road?

Double RL Ranch overlook with view of the San Juan Mountains

Overlook at Double RL Ranch near Ridgway, CO

From Grand Junction, drive South on Hwy 50/550 to Ridgway, CO and turned right, or west. About 9 miles outside of Ridgway there is a scenic overlook we have stopped at many times to take photos of Mount Snuffles and Mount Wilson. It’s on Google Maps as “San Juan Mountains Scenic View”. See our most recent photo in this post.

What we didn’t realize until our return trip, is that fence you see, it goes on for about 20 miles, is the fence line for the Double RL Ranch, a rustic haven owned by American fashion designer Ralph Lauren and his wife Ricky. They own 17,000 acres and there’s an article online where Oprah describes her visit to the Double RL Ranch that includes some photos of his Americana themed ranch. Oprah also visited Tom Cruise’s old house in Telluride, which I will tell you about later, when we talk about the Telluride Airport. Plus, she has a home in Mountain Village!

The Amazing Drive Itself

After the scenic overlook near Ridgway, we took a left onto CR-58P. There’s a sign for Last Dollar Road. The road is closed from January to May due to snow. This is where our Last Dollar Road day trip officially begins. The unpaved county road was wide and well maintained. Our first photo op was at Mattie Ross’ Ranch from the True Grit movie with John Wayne. True Grit was filmed in 1969 and begins and ends at the family ranch of young Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), which was filmed at a historic home on Last Dollar Road above Ridgway. In the final scene, John Wayne jumps his horse over a fence and rides off into the distance. The ranch house has been restored and remains private property. The scenery around it hasn’t changed much and is as gorgeous as it was then.

We left the county road and that’s where it got narrower, steeper, and rockier. We chuckled when we saw this warning sign. Luckily, we chose to drive the Last Dollar Road during dry conditions in August. It was amazing. We went through aspen groves, spruce-fir forests and open meadows with sweeping views. The road is very rutted due to snowmelt run-off down the mountain side. We drove about 5-10 miles per hour, sometimes using 4-wheel-drive Low to climb some steep slopes. We waited for cows to move off the road once. Didn’t pass any cars on the way up, up, up to Last Dollar Pass. Each bend in the road delivers jaw-dropping scenery.

At the top of the pass, we stopped at the popular overlook. I’m not sure what the spot is officially called but it was stunning. The views are unreal. There is a ramp where the road literally goes off a cliff. I saw a video of this and so we parked the Taco there too and took some photos! This is where we finally crossed paths with a Jeep and a couple of motorized dirt bikes.

After this we started our decent into Telluride. We hit a narrow stretch, wide enough for just one vehicle on this two-way shelf road. A few minutes later we passed a Jeep, and they rolled down their window to ask, “What road is this?” I answered the Last Dollar Road. The 75-year-old driver smirked and said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. We weren’t sure we were on the right road!” He drove off with his lovely wife. We smiled. They were more clueless that we were, but they were “doing it” at their age. That is why we take these trips while we can. While we are healthy and able to appreciate this beautiful state.

Telluride Airport

We continued our decent and popped out right at the Telluride Regional Airport (TEX). It’s a one-runway regional airport and the end of the runway drops off into a deep canyon. We have seen the airport from the free Telluride Gondola that takes you from downtown Telluride up and over to Mountain Village. We joked at how short the runway is. Now, seeing it up close, it looks even shorter. It does curve upward at the end of the runway to give pilots a “lift” for takeoff. You can see Mountain Village behind the Taco in the photo we took at the airport entrance.

The Telluride Regional Airport is open year-round to commercial flights from Denver and Phoenix via United and American Airlines. However, I bet most of the traffic is from private jets and charter services. There was construction going on when we were there. They might be adding another taxiway and more hangars for all those private jets. Their website has a page about Do’s and Don’ts for high altitude mountain flying and warnings about weather, wind events, and the potential to be rerouted to other airports, like the Montrose/Telluride Regional Airport located an hour and a half north of Telluride.

A Few Famous People

Near Telluride Airport is the residential community called Aldasoro Ranch. In 1913, the Aldasoro family moved to this area from Northern Spain to raise sheep and provide lamb and wool to the nearby mining camps. Eventually they subdivided their land into individual home sites. The family still lives here and now runs Telluride Sleights and Wagons, which offers sleigh rides and an event space with spectacular views.

I have joked with my friends about Tom Cruise living in Telluride. Here’s a link to Tom Cruise’s old 298-acre mountain retreat. I say old because he sold it in 2021. Here’s a unique tidbit we also discovered while on our Last Dollar road day trip. When Tom Cruise was dating Penelope Cruz back in the early 2000’s, she would take a short trail called the Breckenridge Trail near his estate. It’s a 2-mile route above the Telluride Airport near the Aldasoro community. However, locals call the trail Penelope’s or Penelope’s Cruise. I assume she was spotted using the trail when she visited.

I mentioned Oprah Winfrey earlier when I was talking about the Double RL Ranch. You may or may not know that Oprah has a house here too. Oprah Winfrey’s Telluride House.

Downtown Telluride

Last Dollar Saloon view of Telluride box canyon mountainside

View from the roof of the Telluride box canyon

As you approach downtown, you drive in on Colorado Ave, the main street. Telluride is in a box canyon with steep slopes and rugged mountains surrounding the laid-back and unforgettable town. We drove to the end of the street before we found the last on-street parking spot. We paid for 2 hours of parking ($5) and started exploring the downtown area. As expected, there are many unique shops and boutiques, restaurants and breweries, adventure guide outfitters, museums and galleries. We spotted the historic Last Dollar Saloon and decided to go in, given the theme of the day! We had drinks on the roof with great views of the Gondola, downtown, and the picturesque mountainside. Their website touts that they were named “#1 Best Skier Dive Bar in the World”, it seems fitting.

Michelle noticed people gathering below on the street. We did notice a banner for the Mushroom Festival when we came into town and folks gathered at Telluride Town Park. That’s why we got the last parking spot.

Mush Fest, formally known as the Mushroom Festival

The Mushroom Festival was unexpected and eye-opening. People were dressed up as mushrooms, wearing mushroom hats and other unique costumes. It’s a weekend festival described on their website as “A weekend of mushroom love, community connection and fungi everything. You can expect expert hosted forays to ID mushrooms in the great San Juan Wilderness, talks from world renown mycologists, a foundation of the fest rooted off psychedelics and its current resurgence, large community gatherings, culinary delights, dozens of mushroom vendors and of course the world renown Telluride Mushroom Festival parade. Every year the festival attracts 1000’s of fungi fans from across the world.”

They sell tickets for their main event in the park. We just happened to witness the parade of mushroom lovers down Colorado Ave. Some looked, well, high on shrooms, and others just strolled down the street in their fancy costumes. The town of Telluride quite literally shuts down to 1000’s of mushroom people marching down Main Street to music, dancers, drummers and some pushed a mushroom vehicle known as Amanita-mobile down the street.

After the Mushroom Parade “experience” we got dinner at Steamies Burger Bar. While we didn’t have their specialty steamed burgers, we definitely enjoyed our food. Michelle had a cup of the Truffle Herb Mac-n-Cheese and I had a great chicken wrap sandwich. The Visit Telluride website has a list of events by season and a lot more.

Wrapping It Up

We sure loved our Last Dollar Road day trip. I think we will be talking about everything we experienced for years to come. We loved the gorgeous aspen forest with unobstructed views of Sneffels Mountain Range and Wilson Peak. The range of colors from brown, green, and red against the bright blue sky was so beautiful. I forgot to mention that we noticed some forest service road camp sites on the Telluride side of the pass. There were no bathrooms, water or other services along the trail. It’s as rustic as it gets. We loved seeing the large ranches on the Ridgway side and the views from the Last Dollar Pass at an elevation of 10,663 feet. If we had family or friends in town, we might drive to Telluride on the highway and just go up to the Last Dollar Pass from Telluride and back down again. That would take less time and still offer spectacular views. Until next time!

I mention Telluride and Mountain Village in my post called Top Day Trips from Grand Junction with additional photos. This was the first time we visited Telluride without taking the Gondola up to Mountain Village.

Move to Grand Junction and Do Day Trips Like This One!

Double RL Ranch fence overlooking the San Juan Mountains

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by Paul Aspelin, REALTOR®

Top Day Trips from Grand Junction, Colorado

Use this area as a base camp to experience the top day trips from Grand Junction Colorado. When you visit Grand Junction, you’ll find so many wonderful things to do and see in the Grand Valley. It would be a challenge to list them all from here. Instead, I’d like to share some of the day trips from Grand Junction, Colorado that I have done with family and friends and would go again in a heartbeat. I include some tips and insights for each location. I post short videos and announce new website posts on my Facebook page called Live Your Vacation in Grand Junction.

I will warn you, cell service is spotty in this region, so be sure to download Google maps, bring a paper map, or know where you are going. And always pack snacks and plenty of water to drink. Read my post about avoiding altitude sickness if this is your first time at elevations of 5,000-10,000 feet. We took some of these top day trips from Grand Junction Colorado before we moved to the area and wouldn’t hesitate to go back with friends and family that visit.

ATVing can get messy on Moab, UT, especially when you ride the day after it snows!

Moab, Utah

Great for mountain biking, ATVing, “jeeping”, yes, that’s a thing in Moab. Exceptional trails for all sorts of outdoor activities. Plus, access to Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. We’ve stayed in Moab twice now for Thanksgiving to use the ATV trails. Once we rode on a friend’s ATV and the second time, we did a full day rental with a trailer. It was expensive, but worth it, we had so much fun on the trails. One of our favorite restaurants there is Pasta Jay’s, exceptional Italian food! Check out the Corona Arch hike, the petroglyphs along “wall street” as the local climbers refer to it, and the many dinosaur track locations. The town has great shopping and a very laid-back vibe with an array of off-road vehicles lining the streets. There is always something to do and see in Moab! We really enjoyed seeing real dinosaur tracks just west of Moab.

Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur bones at Dinosaur National Park

Drive 2 hours north to see a pile of actual dinosaur bones still intact from inside the museum that was built around it. It’s pretty cool. The bones traveled down a river, and many came to a final resting place together. I have been to the museum and am planning to go back to hike the trails and see more fossils in the area. We stopped here on a drive back to Minnesota and it didn’t disappoint. On that trip we also hit nearby Flaming Gorge on our drive north, a beautiful area too! This route helped us avoid the I-70 closure due to a forest fire in Glenwood Canyon.

Telluride

2.5 hours south, Telluride is known for its winter skiing and snowboarding, but it’s an exceptional day trip for summer activities like hiking, biking, shopping, concerts and more. Standing on the street and looking at the town feels majestic with the towering mountains surrounding you.

View of Telluride from the Gondola

In Telluride, you can ride the gondola in town to the top of the mountain, for free, and onward to Mountain Village. Our first time there was in November and my wife said, “If there was such a thing as the North Pole, its Mountain Village”.

You’ll find plenty of shopping and dining at the foot of the ski mountain and in the downtown area of Telluride. While enjoying the scenery from the gondola, look for the tiny runway at the Telluride airport. Don’t know how those planes can take off and get high enough before they run out of runway at the end of the cliff! There isn’t any specific parking for the gondola, but you can hunt for a spot on the street or parking ramp and walk to the entrance. There is just something magical about a visit to Telluride any time of year.

Ouray and Silverton

Ouray is pronounced (yur-ay). These are beautiful mountain towns in the San Juan Mountains with so much history and allure. It takes 2 hours to get to Ouray and then you can take the famous “million dollar highway” to Silverton. A scary, but beautiful road. I don’t recommend driving it in the winter with its many 15 mph hairpin curves and lack of guardrails. Avalanches kept knocking down the guardrails and they got tired of replacing them, so they just don’t have any. And the shoulder is about 10 inches until the 1000-foot drop off, no kidding! It’s an adventure just to drive that stretch of highway.

Ouray at the “Switzerland of America” sign

Ouray, also referred to as the “Switzerland of America” offers an incredible quaint, historic mountain town experience with views you won’t soon forget. While in town, enjoy a soak at one of the local hot springs, or take a short hike to see the Box Canyon Waterfall, or just enjoy watching the ice climbers in the winter. Be prepared to be amazed.

Continue your scenic journey South, 24 miles to Silverton, which offers great shopping, dining, breweries, and lots of trails. Be warned, there is a tourist sightseeing train that travels between Durango and Silverton which can make for extended wait times at some restaurants depending on the timing of its arrival. We ate at the Lacey Rose Saloon located in the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton. The atmosphere was 100% Old West! Exactly what we came to experience. We enjoyed a great lunch listening to a live ragtime piano player and found out there was still a bullet in the woodwork behind the bar from a prior “shootout”. You can literally feel the Old West and mining history as you stroll the main street.

Read my post called Day Trip to Ouray for more about Ouray, CO.

Snowshoeing on the Mesa

Grand Mesa

The world’s largest flat-top mountain is just 45 minutes from Grand Junction. There are 300+ lakes with miles and miles of hiking, ATV, snowmobiling, and cross-country ski trails. You can ski at Powderhorn Mountain Resort with much shorter wait times for the chair lifts. We attended their Octoberfest celebration with German food and beer while we were driving through looking at the stunning fall leaves.

On the Grand Mesa, there are rental cabins, lodges, and campgrounds available for overnight stays. We drove up there once in June when it was 99 degrees in Grand Junction. Up near Mesa, CO it was only 89 degrees and at the top it was 69 degrees, a thirty degree difference in temperature. Grand Junction is at about 4,483′ elevation and we went to up near 10,300′ to Island Lake.

Be warned, the visitor center on the main road across “the Mesa” isn’t always open. Oh, and using the bathroom spurred my post about what I learned in the first 3 months of living in Grand Junction, always have toilet paper in your car as rest stops, pit toilets and visitor centers are often out of toilet paper!

Read my post about what its like to live on the Grand Mesa.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

North Rim Exclamation Point view to Gunnison River

Very picturesque just 1.5 hours SE of Grand Junction. You drive through Delta and Montrose, cute small towns to get to the Gunnison River gorge and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Here’s how the National Park Service describes it… “Big enough to be overwhelming, still intimate enough to feel the pulse of time, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park exposes you to some of the steepest cliffs, oldest rock, and craggiest spires in North America. With two million years to work, the Gunnison River, along with the forces of weathering, has sculpted this vertical wilderness of rock, water, and sky.” We were impressed. We stopped here on our way back from a trip to Ouray.

Read my post about our visit and an awesome hike in the North Rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

Glenwood Springs Hot Springs

If you drive East on I-70 right to Iron Mountain Hot Springs from Grand Junction, it’s about an hour and 20 minutes. However, our first time there we went onto the Mesa first to do some snowshoeing near Mesa Lakes Lodge and then drove to Glenwood Springs specifically to soak in the hot springs. Iron Mountain Hot Springs offers a 3-hour soaking “appointment” and that was just the right amount of time. They have a changing room with showers and lockers. We spent time in pretty much every pool they offered with a range of temperatures from 96-108 degrees. It was our first hot spring experience. It’s right next to I-70 so there was a little road noise. But you also viewed the Colorado River, so that was nice. We watched the sun set over the mountain. There’s another hot spring there too, Glenwood Hot Springs, also along the river and the interstate. We will be checking out other hot springs in Colorado, but this is definitely a great option for a day trip from Grand Junction.

Maroon Bells Aspen/Snowmass Area

Maroon Bells Aspelin Snowmass shows trail, lake and maroon capped mountains in the distance

Maroon Bells Aspen Snowmass area

You can drive to the Maroon Bells Visitor Center just outside of Aspelin, CO. There is a parking ramp (not cheap!) and you can take the Maroon Bells Shuttle to Maroon Lake. I recommend you make a reservation and pay ahead of time or it might be full. Supposedly this is one of the most photographed places in Colorado. We paid for the shuttle and once at Maroon Lake took the Crater Lake Trail. That trail is moderate with lots of rocks to avoid while walking on the trail, but it was stunning. A great experience. If you go to downtown Aspen, we recommend John Denver Sanctuary. A nice stroll through nature accessed right from downtown.

For more Day Trip ideas, use the search box on the right to search for “day trips from Grand Junction”. I have made many more posts since this one of various places to go and sites to see!

Care for Colorado Leave No Trace Principles

https://www.colorado.com/articles/leave-no-trace-care-colorado The Care for Colorado Leave No Trace Principles were created in partnership between the Colorado Tourism Office and the Leave No Trace organization to address recreation-related impacts in Colorado. Read their tips of what to know before you go, sticking to the trails, and other topics like trash, fire and wildlife.

Living in Grand Junction

If you fly into the Grand Junction airport to visit Mesa County, let me know. I’d love to share what it’s like to move to Grand Junction AND living in Grand Junction now as a full-time resident. We relocated to the area in 2023. As a licensed REALTOR® I can show you some properties while you are here too! Read my posts about moving to Grand Junction, Fruita, or Palisade. Ask me about any town in Mesa County!

Read the Two Day Itinerary for Grand Junction Visit post for more ideas or Things to Do in Grand Junction: Easy Hikes.

Happy travels! Live your vacation in Grand Junction!