Having finally reached the summit of Mt. Antero - a place so accessible and yet not included on the Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) - we were headed into Buena Vista just before 11:00am in search of something to eat. We'd learned our lesson the previous morning - having arrived in Lake City before the traditional lunch hour, opting to skip lunch, and later regretting it - and @mrs.turbodb was working the airwaves to find a good spot to stop for lunch.
Half a day later - having added a highlight that every BDR adventurer should enjoy as part of Stage 3 - we were back in Buena Vista.
Our first choice - a taco truck along the main drag - was all buttoned up as we pulled into the parking area, forcing us a little further down the street to the nearby Casa Sanchez, which also got good reviews and had shady outdoor seating, the perfect way to enjoy the 80°F morning as we watched the world go by.
Good, but not great. The beans were a little smoky for our taste.
After a relaxing lunch, fuel, and a quick pit stop at the local City Market to pick up some lettuce for the taco-rittoes we'd be eating for dinner on the remainder of the trip, we headed north into the unfortunately named Mosquito Mountains.
As we left Buena Vista in our rear-view mirror, Mt. Princeton towered along in the distance.
Actually, we first got a little off-route, as we noticed a multi-bore tunnel in the once-rail-grade-now-road-bed we were following out of town. Assuming that the BDR would take advantage of such a cool feature, we'd plowed ahead without even looking at the map. Turns out the BDR skipped this cool tunnel entirely, so if you ever find yourself running the COBDR, make sure to take the 500-foot detour to enjoy this awesome hole through the hillsides!
Light and dark, light and dark, light and dark. Five mini-tunnels, all in a row!
Retracing our path once we realized our mistake, we got a little flexy as we wandered into the Mosquito Mountains.
Compared to the mountains further south, the Mosquitos - though still nearly 10,000 feet above sea level - seemed more like foothills, and more well-graded gravel roads meant we were quickly putting another stage behind us. This time, the highlight turned out to be the perfectly composed skies, the puffy white clouds following us along our route.
Sun over here, rain over there.
Cottonballs of the sky.
We were in and out of the aspen. Here, a little further north, they were already prepping for fall!
Ultimately on our way to Gypsum, one thing was for sure - our morning detour to Antero hadn't only been fun, it also put us in a good spot from a camping perspective. Because again, we were traveling at relatively high speeds, even as we stopped for photos and multiple passes through water crossings at every chance we got! 
Easing in.
Throttling out.
Now nearing 4:00pm, we knew it was too early to camp, but late enough that we should start figuring out the general area we wanted to call home for the night. There were two passes - Weston and Hagerman - between us and the end of the stage, and assuming neither of them were paved, I hoped that one of them would offer a good stopping point.
A few minutes later - and so clearly out of the question from a camping perspective - we began the climb up Weston Pass.
Unlike Los Pinos Pass earlier in the day, Weston was a respectable climb, reaching 11,921 feet and once again shuttling us over and along the Continental Divide.
Most of the climb to Weston Pass was through a pine forest.
Only at the end did we break out of the trees and catch a glimpse of Weston Peak.
Views as we reached the saddle were rather pedestrian, but there, trying to balance a cell phone in selfie mode on a backpack were a group of folks who'd clearly not visited any of the other more dramatic passes in the area. Offering our services, we snapped a few photos before hopping back in the Tacoma and continuing - with no photo of our own - down the west side of the pass.
It was pretty up here - especially with the green shrubs lining the creek bed - but we had our hopes up for a more "edge" camp spot.
Between Weston and Hagerman Pass, there wasn't much of note on the BDR itself. This was - we thought - a miss, given that less than two miles from the route was the town of Leadville, CO.
Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive dwarf slag heaps near Leadville, waste from the town’s mills and smelters. Mines pock steep slopes east of the picturesque metropolis. The Leadville Mining District, active up until 1998, yielded over $500 million in silver, lead, zinc, gold, and other metals. Mining began in the 1860s when placer gold was discovered along the Arkansas River. Years later, heavy gray material that settled out with the gold was identified as lead sulfide laced with silver.
Sixty-five tons of silver bullion awaiting shipment at Leadville. Photo (one side of a stereo pair) by Gurney, printed by Kilburn Brothers, Littleton, New Hamphshire.
The minerals were deposited well after the Laramide Orogeny when rich solutions from intruding mid-Tertiary magmas penetrated faults in Devonian and Mississippian limestone, which provided the right chemical environment for mineral precipitation. Faults in the mining area bring enriched veins to the surface stairstep style all the way up the slope above Leadville. See cross section for Colorado 9 at Alma on page 215. Across the Mosquito Range, mines at Breckenridge and Fairplay yielded similar gold placers and silver ores, though neither was as fabulously rich as Leadville.
Leadville’s peacefulness now belies the amount of activity here during its heyday when hundreds of miles of underground tunnels probed beneath and east of the city and seventy-five mills and seventeen smelters were processing ore. The Leadville area is pocked with collapsed mine tunnels!
Little care was taken to contain lead and other toxic metals. Groundwater interfered with mining, so a drainage tunnel was excavated to carry it off, releasing acid and around 200 tons per year of heavy metals, including lead, into nearby streams. In winter lead-rich smelter slag was used to sand roads.Roadside Geology of Colorado
Whatever the reason for skipping Leadville, it gave us a little more time to work our way along the shores of Turquoise Lake - where the roads were closed for some filming event, but no one seemed to stop us as we continued slowly up the road - and to the base of Hagerman Pass.
There, we passed a couple trucks - a nicely appointed 5th gen 4Runner and a current-generation Chevy Colorado - that had passed us as we dodged potholes along the edge of Turquoise Lake. We took that as a good sign that the road would get a little rougher, hopefully leaving the camp sites a little emptier as we climbed from 9,800 to 11,925 feet over the course of the next ten miles.
Turquoise Lake wasn't looking very colorful, but the sun breaking under the clouds did a nice job of illuminating the trees!
We'd end up playing leap-frog with those two trucks for nearly the entire ten miles. We'd pull ahead slightly and then get out to investigate a camp site, at which point they'd motor up the road past us. They'd be stopped to admire a view, and we'd pull up to do the same. At one point - still a thousand feet from the summit, one of them wandered back to the Tacoma to let us know that there was a nice camp site just off the side of the road. Even @mrs.turbodb was skeptical of this seemingly benign behavior, wondering out loud if "they just want to make sure they get the good spot at the top."
As the sun raced toward the horizon, we enjoyed views of Mount Massive in the near distance.
There were three or four spots that we considered for camp before reaching the high point of the pass. Each had their pros and cons, but in the end we opted for what was perhaps the most obvious spot - one right at the summit with expansive views in every direction.
Long light.
Breaking out the avocado, taco meat, tortillas and other fixings for tacorritos, @mrs.turbodb got the kitchen setup as I deployed the tent. It was a little breezy in the relative open of the summit, but our bigger concern was the lightning we could see a few miles to the south. Luckily, a few minutes of NOAA weather on the ham radio set our minds at ease - there was no rain forecast after midnight, and we could tell that the storm cell would miss us as it raced in an easterly direction.
By the time we were done with dinner and a bit of cleanup, darkness had set in. For us, that meant only one thing: it was time for some shut eye.
The following morning...
Peaceful camp at the top of Hagerman Pass.
As usual, I was up before sunrise. Unlike the previous couple of nights, I'd installed my earplugs before nodding off, and that turned out to be a fantastic decision! Combined with the cool breeze up at nearly 12,000 feet, I'd slept amazingly well. The same was true for my companion, and after unfolding and powering up our little buddy, I climbed back under the covers to snap a few poorly-piloted pictures as she enjoyed the last few minutes of warmth while reading her book.
Rosy rays kissing the peak of Mount Massive.
We weren't quite camped on the cliff, but from a distance, it's all the same. 
Then, it was time for breakfast and a quick towel-off of the tent. Low temps had resulted in a bit of dew on the rain fly as the morning air warmed up around the cool fabric. Soon - the sun rising quickly to our east - the entire range was bathed in a warm yellow, a reminder of how fleeting the pre-dawn pastels can be in a place like this.
Mount Massive looking bright under blue skies.
And then - just before 8:00am - we were off. The road up here at the pass was still rough, but as an historic grade of the Colorado Midland Railroad, it got smoother and smoother as we shed elevation, eventually turning to pavement at Frying Pan Road. There, we promptly missed our turn, continuing for a quarter or mile or so to yet another attraction that most BDR riders never see.
Backside of Hagerman.
This area of Pitkin County was settled in the 1880s. The numerous settlements along the upper Frying Pan Valley area grew up around the route of the Colorado Midland Railroad. Until 1885 the valleys of the Roaring Fork drainage were accessible only by foot, horse, and mule, and the mineral wealth could not be fully realized until more efficient modes of transportation could be established.
In the early 1880s, two railroads were in competition to reach the valley floor first and establish themselves to claim their share of the wealth. The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, a narrow-gauge railway, chose to extend its route from Leadville, through Glenwood Canyon alongside the Colorado River to Glenwood Springs, The Colorado Midland chose to extend its standard gauge line from Leadville byway of a tunnel through the Continental Divide connecting Leadville and the head of the Frying Pan Valley, then proceeding down to the Roaring Fork Valley Floor. The Denver & Rio Grande arrived in Aspen in October of 1887, ahead of Colorado Midland by only a few months.
The completed Colorado Midland Railroad was the only standard gauge route in the Colorado high country and traveled along the alignment of this road between Leadville and Basalt. The total length of the rail line was 261 miles. Depending in the era in which you traveled, it featured up to 18 tunnels, the longest of which was almost 2 miles long. The Hagerman Tunnel, which crossed under the Continental Divide, is 2,200 feet long and sits at over 11,000 feet above sea level. The construction of the route was an engineering marvel. The tunnels, bridges and the railroad bed were constructed by hundreds of men using dynamite, picks and shovels, summer and winter. Camps were established to support the workers, and these camps quickly grew into established communities that lived on beyond the railroad construction.
This site was originally known as Calcium, named for the lime processing industry that was centered here once the railroad was established. The Lime Kilns, located across the road, are the last remnants of that industry. The Calcium community eventually became part of Thomasville, which still exists today.
Calcium-Thomasville Lime Kilns.
The Railroad ran until 1921 and supported the business of numerous communities along the route. It also made the Frying Pan Valley popular for sightseers. Even when it was first being settled, tourists would ride the train up from Leadville to pick wildflowers.info sign
After checking out the kilns, we worked our way back to Eagle-Thomasville Road, which would take us through a series of foothills - their measly 10,000 foot elevations not even registering for us anymore - before we'd descend into Gypsum. Here, the scenery was varied, providing plenty of visual interest as we cruised along on a beautiful Sunday morning.
Clusters of Aspen made for splashes of bright as the sun streamed through leaves that were ready for fall.
The clouds were cooperating nicely in the wide open spaces.
So red road!
It was a few minutes before noon when we reached the end of the stage and pulled into Gypsum. It'd taken several days and four stages, but we'd finally arrived in a reasonably sized town - with several lunch options - at lunch time!
Welcome to our town. We're named after drywall.
There's a lot of American in this entrance!
Or at least, that's what we thought when we looked up places to eat on our phones. It turns out that these places were in the next town over - Eagle - a mere six miles away. So that's where we headed, for a burger, fries, and frosty!
The Whole Story
