Crested Butte

3 Jun 2020-Yesterday we took a ride up to Crested Butte, but before I get to that I had to post this picture from the Pioneer Museum that I overlooked the other day. This is a hair curler contraption from the 1940s...looks downright unsafe, huh?

We headed out to Crested Butte fairly early, taking Fluffy with us for a change. We don't really like leaving her alone all day...she is used to having the other dogs around all her life and not being alone, so we put her bed in the back of the car and off we went.

We saw a sign just outside town for this fish hatchery, so we pulled in to take a look. Fluffy was happy to take a look with us. Each of these "runs" can hold about 30,000 fish.

This writing tells us how the fish are raised from eggs thru release, and surprisingly how the fish return here 3 to 4 years after release to lay their eggs during spawning. I wouldn't have thought that fish would return to a hatchery to lay their eggs.

Some scenery on the way to Crested Butte.

Crested Butte is a really pretty town, very much reliant on the tourists who come here to ski in the winter or hike/bike/horseback ride/go 4-wheeling in the summer. I don't know what the knight and dragon were doing on the side of the road, but it was cute. Some of the downtown buildings date back to 1895. Again, Fluffy was loving being the tourist with us!

From Crested Butte we drove 3 miles to Mt. Crested Butte, which exists solely as a place for tourists to rent hotels/condos. It didn't seem like there were many permanent residents, and because of all the hotels it wasn't very pretty.

But from there we took a ride thru the Gunnison National Forest, which was really pretty.

There was an area where there was actually private property...I assume they were there before it was made a National Foresst, and were probably grandfathered in. I can't imagine living here, as you can see there are places where there is still snow on the ground, so they must have a hellacious winter.

About 5 miles into the forest we came to this former "Ghost Town", called Gothic, that is now used by about 60 college students and their professors during the summer doing resesrch on global warming, etc. Again, I don't know what the school zone info is about.

We started to go into what used to be the town hall and were met by Laurel, who told us that the town used to be a mining town, that it still didn't have running water, that most of the houses have outhouses, and they use solar power for whatever electricity they have.

After leaving Laurel, we proceeded along the road just admiring the scenery. Unfortunately, we had to turn around about 7 miles in because the road was blocked.

We got out of the car to take some pictures showing the snow.

And when walking around we saw what we think were bear pawprints in the ground. There were only two pawprints, so we think he was standing on his hind feet surveying the scene. haha That's Cathy running away in fear. I held my ground!

As did Fluffy! What courage!

Although she was exhausted on the drive home. Notice that she didn't even have the strength to get her whole body in her bed...poor thing!