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Silverton

Monday. Both furnaces are working fine. Up to a point. That point is seventy
degrees. The front heater will do whatever you ask of it. The back heater
stops at about seventy. If you’re chilled and want to take a shower in a
warm room and turn the heater up higher, it might go higher. It might not.
It depends. I don’t know what it depends on. It just depends. Judy was bad, but now I forget why now. I’m bad because I’m not taking good
care of the propane. I figure you can turn the furnace off at night and
open the window if you want, or you can turn the furnace on, and leave the
window closed. No sense trying to heat all of the high country with a
limited amount of propane. It still gets down to freezing every night, so
it’s too cold to sleep comfortably without the furnace, so I set it at sixty
degrees when we go to bed. Here’s the bad part. I open a window over my
head to get some of that nice cool night air before we fall asleep. Then we
fall asleep. We fall asleep before I reach up to close the window, and we
sleep until dawn before I wake up and close it. Not very good propane
management. Great sleeping though. Work went well. Had the exit conference at 4:30. Finished by five. Thank
you Stuart. Silverton. The Durango Silverton railroad. It stops in Silverton just
before noon. Judy went out at lunch, stood by a locomotive, and got
blasted. Left Silverton. Negotiated Molas and Coal Bank Passes back to Durango to
spend the night. I can’t just keep going on about the scenery can I? Okay.
Just let me say, we’ve been hanging out on a road called the “Million Dollar
Highway”, and in what’s know as the Colorado Alps. The Switzerland of the
Rockies. Had some serious barbeque for dinner. Boy, am I thirsty! I have now walked around the rear of the motorhome at least thirty or forty
times in a row, without walking into the rear slide. I wasn’t so good at
the start of the trip. You might think it would be hard not to notice that
rear slide sticking out, but not so. It doesn’t extend down low. It sticks
out about shoulder high, depending on the surrounding terrain. Walking
around the rear of the motorhome in Leadville, in a snowstorm, looking at
the ground, trying to see, I walked right into the slide and tried to knock
myself out. That left a mark. I’m more careful now. And my head feels
better too. Tomorrow. Back to finish the Durango job.

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SIlverton

Saturday. That took a lot of leaving. We did the Breakfast in a Bag thing. Raw
scrambled eggs, cheese, bacon bits, mushrooms, olives, ham, anything you
want in an omelet spread out on the table, in containers. Write your name
on the outside of a Ziploc bag. Pick the stuff you want. Dump it into the
Ziploc. Squeeze all the air out and seal it. Drop it into the boiling
water for ten minutes. Dump it onto a plate. It’s an omelet. Thirty-five people in the group, plus us. It took a lot of conversation to
get through breakfast. Then several people wanted to come over and meet
Rags the cat. Then there were several RV tours exchanged as everybody
checked out each other’s rig. Finally, we escaped. Rags didn’t make it very far. He started drooling. Just can’t handle that
occasional motion. We stopped and drugged him, and he rode quietly after
that. We had lunch at the Durango RV Park we stayed in before. We picked
up a WiFi terminal for high speed internet and did an email dump. From there, north on highway 550 to Silverton. A person might be
disinclined to bring a motorhome up this steep winding road. It is
definitely slower in a motorhome than in a car. But slower means a better
look at the scenery, and in a motorhome means you get that look from a
higher perch. Not much traffic. Plenty of room to let the people by that
do catch up to us. Plenty of high county scenery. Arrived at the motorhome park in Silverton. There are ten units here
already. We parked at the other end of the row from the one that has
www.rightwingbooks.com <http://www.rightwingbooks.com> stenciled on its
forehead. Leveling logic. Four point hydraulic levelers. The front two work
together, off one button. The back two work together off one button, or
individually, off separate buttons. All side to side leveling has to be
done with the rear levelers. When leveling, you start by letting the air of
the suspension so the whole coach settles down. Then you want to level it
with the least amount of lift, so that last step going in and out isn’t too
high. Besides, if you lift it too high, it might look like you don’t know
what you’re doing. I read the directions for leveling. I followed them. If you follow the
directions, sometimes it ends up looking like you don’t know what you’re
doing. The directions say to put both the front jacks down until they touch
the ground. Then put the rear jacks down and level it side to side. Then
raise the front jacks some more if you need to. The problem is, it changes
the side to side leveling when you raise the front jacks, so then you have
to level it again with one of the rear jacks which raises the whole rear end
a little more, so you have to raise the front a little more…. You get the
picture. The hydraulic jacks will extend far enough to raise the wheels
clear off the ground. It looks silly if you’re on fairly level ground to
begin with, and your motorhome is that far up on its tiptoes to get level.
Theoretically, one corner of the motorhome should never have to be lifted at
all. Here is what I discovered. Don’t go at it from just one direction. You get
to watch a leveling bubble while you’re pushing the leveling buttons. Don’t
level it all at once, front to back, or side to side. Bring it a little
closer each way, alternating as you go. Sneak up on it.
Silverton Colorado. 9,300 feet above sea level in a mountain valley. It’s
all up from here. It’s a rough mountain town. They haven’t paved the
alleys here yet. They’re all dirt and gravel. They haven’t paved the
streets yet either. They’re all dirt and gravel too. There is only one
paved road in town, the one that runs right down the center. It’s a
dirt-road main street kind of place….. except that the main street is
paved. It was sad when we left Riverside. I picked up the feeders and packed them
in an outside bin. As soon as I did, a house finch hopped up on the grill
stand where the seed feeder had been, and hopped all over it looking for the
feeder. At the same time, and hummingbird was buzzing all over where the
other feeder had been. They’ll have to adjust to life without us now. It
took the hummingbirds two days to find our feeder at Riverside. It took
them ten minutes to find it here. All broadtails. Different altitude. Tomorrow. Check out Ouray and Box Canyon Falls.

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Silverton

_____________________________________________
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 10:10 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: trip32 Sunday. New ground. I’ve written trip reports for a month before, but never for
more. He we go on our second month. I wish it were a whole second month,
but alas, no. Just a few more short jobs to do, and it’s back to Denver.
This is too cool. We’re not ready to go back to Denver. Finally, the time has come. We get to pop over to Ouray and pick up the
slam-dunk, can’t-miss brand new bird: the black swift. Twenty-four miles
to Ouray. An hour’s drive. Now we have a problem. If we have a job in
Silverton or Durango, then get a job in Ouray; I don’t know how we’ll get
there. The only way to get to one from the other is to drive over Red
Mountain Pass. Judy says she doesn’t ever want to drive over Red Mountain
Pass in the motorhome. It’s that good. It didn’t help, following a large
gas motorhome down the other side, his brakes smoking and stinking. Not the
kind of place you’d want to wander off the road. Box Canyon Falls. Right outside Ouray. Black Swifts. The Box Canyon Falls
Black Swifts only have one job. That’s to migrate back to Box Canyon Falls
by May 20th. This is May 23d. They didn’t do their job. No black swifts.
How bad does this suck? Now we’ll have to come all the way back here some
other time. Drove out to Ridgway. Had lunch at the state park. Birded the forest.
Annie swam in the Uncompaghre. Explored the town. Passed the Orvis Hot
Springs Bill wants to check out. We know where it is now. Drove back
through Ouray. Made the drive back over Red Mountain Pass. Judy
reiterated. Not in the motorhome. Took a detour just before we got back to
Silverton. Ophir Pass. Four wheel drive road. Still ten foot drifts at
the top. For a person who doesn’t want to drive over Red Mountain in the
motorhome, Judy is good at driving these four-wheel-drive roads. Back safe and sound. Ready for work tomorrow. Mountain Studies Institute.
Good place for it. Silverton. We’ll go see what they’re studying.