On The Rocks In Colorado made a club trip to Ouray to run several trails. The one everyone was looking forward to running Black Bear Pass. Unfortunately, weather was not going to cooperate this trip and made it impossible to attempt Black Bear Pass due to snowy conditions.

It was time for us to change our plans and find some other trails that were lower in elevation where we could avoid the snow. We decided to go to the top of Stony Pass and come back down.

We decided to go to the top of Stony Pass due to the snowy weather canceling our Black Bear Pass hopes. To get there we took the “Million Dollar Highway” to Silverton. Once in Silverton we pulled into the Vistors Center to meet up with the rest of the group.

Once we came out of the Visitors Center we took a right through Silverton and followed the road North.

The road at the North end of town turns into a dirt road. Follow the dirt road up to the start of the trail. Trails are really well marked in the San Juans and you should have very little trouble finding the trail head.

At the start of the trail everyone lined up and made sure they were disconnected and aired down to the desired levels. Once we started the views were fantastic, and we enjoyed the scenery up the mountain.

The trail followed the side of the mountain and enabled us to see some outstanding views. With the recent snow we had a nice mixture of snow capped mountains and dry green roads.

As we made our way up the trail we began to see the result of the previous evenings snow storm. The road was just lightly dusted but it gradually worked it’s way up to about 3-4 inches of snow.

Just when we thought all was going well Ted and his scout had a slight problem. It turned out to be a loose coil and after about five minutes he was back on the trail.

Near the top there was a little more snow and you could see into the mountains behind. At the top are a couple of plaques that give a little bit of history on the pass. Normal one would continue on eventually connecting with Lake City, but today we were to turn around and come back down the way we came.

At the end of the trail we noticed a mining building at the top of the mountain to our North. The above picture is with 5x zoom and an 11x digital Zoom it was quite a distance up there and the way wasn’t readily apparent, but it was a very interesting place to build a structure.

It was a good trail and besides the slight mishap with the loose coil there weren’t any problems on the trail, but the whole day was not destined to work out that way.