Day Twelve: Durango, Colorado to Moab, Utah

What an incredible and beautiful day!  The ride from Durango to Ouray along Highway 550 is the one road that everyone said I simply had to take.  (Well, everyone save one woman at dinner last night, who had ridden it on the back of her husband's motorcycle, crying and praying the whole way, and with her eyes closed.)  Let me apologize now for not having any pictures that do the scenery or route the slightest bit of justice; I wanted to ride, not stop.  So I only stopped once:

My one stop, on the descent after Red Mountain Pass (11,018').

Of course, by stopping a whole slew of cars I'd painstakingly (and legally) passed got ahead of me again.  Oh well.  The decent into Ouray really is epic.  Everyone should drive this road.  On a motorcycle, and with your eyes open.

Stopped, for no particular reason, in Ouray

 A few miles north of Ouray, Highway 155 reaches Ridgway, where I turned west onto Highway 62.  Although the road rises and turns much more gradually than on 155, the scenery is huge and spectacular.  I mean, take a look at this:

Exhibit A: Scenery west of Ridgway on Highway 62.

And this:

Exhibit B: Scenery west of Ridgway on Highway 62, just before Dallas Divide.

 Following Highway 62, routes 145, 141, and 90 took me west into Utah.  It's amazing how quickly the scenery morphed from the "Colorado Rocky Mountain" type (above) to the "American Southwest" type (below).  My day's ride ended up in Moab, and therefore firmly in the latter type of landscape.  Incredible!

Highway 90, just east of the Colorado-Utah border.

To get the above photo, I had to double back.  It's a Colorado Adopt-A-Highway sign dedicated, presumably, to the hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  I'm not certain that Galt would've supported the Adopt-A-Highway program -- it seems so, er, altruistic.

Tonight I'm camped in another small cabin, in a campground in Moab.  One of my never-to-be-broken rules of motorcycling is that I will not have the slightest bit of alcohol until the bike is parked for the evening -- and so until tonight I've not had a beer with dinner on this trip.  Conveniently, the campground I'm in tonight is right across the street from the Moab Brewery...