Jo and Calum - France 2015: Rocky Mountain Highs

After the witticism of Calum for the previous two posts, you're back to me for this one. Sorry...

As well as the few typo's in Calum's Denver to Salida post (listed below - did you find any others? Feel free to point them out...) he forgot to mention his observation from the reception office of our Salida motel. The receptionist was quite young, very bubbly, and quite pretty. On the wall in reception was a sash for an entrant in the 'Miss America 2010'. You put 2 and 2 together.

Calum's typo's:
1. Sitting Bull had a PEACE pipe, not a PIECE pipe...
2. The T-Rex tooth is on the left in the photo. That big double spiky thing on the right is the Triceratops horn...
3. If you keep scrolling down after Calum signs off the post you'll find one more photo of a little critter peering out of a hole (works better if the extra lines where the photos were cut from are deleted). This is our first encounter with a native American - it's a Prairie Dog!

Now, back to the journey.

After leaving Salida, we took a slight detour to visit an alligator rescue farm. There were over 250 rescued 'gators of all colours and sizes, as well as various types of snakes, turtles and tortoises, a tarantula (***shudders***), as well as a misplaced salt water crocodile and some emus, and some equally misplaced ostriches. We even talked Danielle and Cameron into holding a baby alligator (although Cam wouldn't hold it without me holding his hands as well).

Spot the gator....

From there we were back on track and headed for Durango. But first, one more stop for the day at the Rocky Mountains Wildlife Park - which was privately run. They didn't have a lot of animals, but what they did have were - for the most part - pretty amazing. Not counting the goat, donkey, sheep, or emu (yep, another displaced Aussie!), we hadn't seen any of the other animals before. There was a ADHD porcupine, that wouldn't stay still for a photo (and stunk to high heaven!); a couple of coyotes, that were smaller than I expected thanks to Mr Warner Bros; a couple of wolves (yeah, we did see these in Scotland, but they were a different type of wolf and these ones were even up moving around!); a rather large elk; a bobcat - very cute!; and a mountain lion (puma, cougar, insert other pseudonym here...). We would have liked to stay to see them be fed, but we had to push on to reach Durango at any reasonable hour.

Elk horn! No wonder they drop these things after 9 months - they're bloody heavy!

Coyotes


Grizzly Bear. And her keeper...

The hotel at Durango was a great pick - two queen sized beds in the main room, and a separate bedroom with yet another queen sized bed! Plenty of room for everyone. After a good night's sleep, we were up and breakfasted and off to catch the Durango to Silverton narrow gauge railway steam train to the top of a mountain and back again. After some use of the Force and some shoddy navigation by Calum (yet again she's being slightly economical with the truth) that had me almost smashing our rental as I cut some poor guy off, we found the car park and made it to the train on time. The scenery on the train ride was pretty awesome - cliffs and bluffs and wooded area giving way to scrub as we got higher. Danielle and I spent a fair bit of time looking out for 'critters' to no avail. Oh, we saw squirrels and chipmunks, but nothing really interesting like deer, elk, moose, bears, or mountain lions. Silverton is an old sliver mine (surprise, surprise), and the water in the river that runs from there to Durango (that the train track follows) is an amazing blue colour. Dunno why though, and Google has been no help on that score (not that I looked too hard...).