Tales From The Camping House

Tales From The Camping House

Monday, July 9, 2012

Back to Cripple Creek Via Phantom Canyon Road

Sunday was a "lazy day" for all of us.  We just stayed at the park doing pretty much nothing.  Karli never got out of her pajamas all day.

When Monday came, we were ready to go again.   We were going to go back to Cripple Creek, but this time we were going to take the Phantom Canyon Road, an unpaved road along the mountains.  Lisa has an SUV so we figured that would be better to drive than our low profile Nissan Altima.

We drove west and just before we got to Canon City we turned onto the Phantom Canyon Road, the first three miles are paved, but then it goes to an unpaved road.

Almost immediately after we got on the unpaved road, the views began.


We came to a mountain tunnel that didn't look big enough for us to go through, but as we got closer, it was a one lane tunnel.


You are literally on the side of the mountain as the road meanders through towards Cripple Creek and Victor.
 We came to this beautiful bridge over a stream.  There was a historical sign there and we saw that this was the route for the Cripple Creek-Victor Railroad, the trains that brought the gold out of Victor and Cripple Creek in the 1880's.  The state used the old railroad line to create this roadway. The road was not nearly as bad as we thought it would be and we could have easily traveled over it with our Altima.


We continued on with more spectacular views, one after another.




 At the top, the temperature gauge read 56 degrees at noon.

 We arrived at Cripple Creek.  We had told Karli about the donkeys there and she was super excited to see them.  Unfortunately, they had gone up into the mountains to pasture and were not in town.  We had one disappointed little girl.
We left Cripple Creek and returned back to the rv park through Woodland Park.  It was another great day!

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