I'm a chicken.  Always have been.  I don't like roller coasters, ferris wheels, haunted houses at Halloween, slasher movies or any other "thrill" like things.  That said.... today's jeep ride into the mountains was one of the scariest things I've ever, in life, done.  Ever. 

The first part started out fine.  We drove to Silverton, a small town about an hours drive north of Durango.  We walked around a little bit, went in a few shops and had lunch at the Brown Bear Cafe.

The drive to Silverton -

 Silverton, from the mountain highway leading into town.  There are about 450 residents who live there year round.  In the summer, that rises to about 800.  They get an average of 200" of snow a year!  

The Brown Bear, where we had lunch -

The company we rented the jeep from sold us a map of jeep trails and gave us some idea of where we might want to go.  We started the Gold Mine Tour from Silverton, heading through some old mining towns.  The road was narrow, and made me nervous because of the drop off cliffs inches away from the tires. We saw waterfalls, creeks, and old mining buildings and houses.

The road...

If you meet someone coming the other direction, you have to find room to move over!

One of the homes at Animas Forks.  It was special because it had "indoor plumbing", which amounted to a closed in hallway to the outhouse.

These little critters are all over!

The road... again

After we left Animas Fork, we went on.... instead of going back the way we came.  If we had known the road was as rough as it was, or as narrow we would have never continued!  Seriously, there were parts of the road that Larry had to get out and evaluate before going on.  On one side you had a wall of mountain going up hundreds of feet, on the other side a straight fall off cliff going down hundreds of feet... and about 6' of road between them.  It was so rocky and rough!  They also don't have road signs on those trails, so all you have is your map and prayers that you're taking the right road lol  I can say lol now, but at the time I was seriously wondering if we'd have to be rescued!  There are no pictures from the last half of our mountain jeep ride, because I was so busy holding on I couldn't hold on and take pictures at the same time! At one point we drove through a little dust tornado!  It just appeared right in front of us, and with the jeep being open we were covered in dust. 

It was an experience, probably one we'll never do again.  Larry thought it was fun, but very stressful.  We were lucky he knew what he was doing, or we would have never made it back.  I was never so happy to see a highway before in my life lol  The jeep was due back at 6pm, we had picked it up about 9:30am... plenty of time we thought.  We were 10 minutes late getting it back, so our little adventure lasted 8 1/2 hours!  Really glad we ate lunch before hitting the trail, and that I picked up an extra big bottle of water.  We came back so tired, thirsty and dirty!  First thing we did after dropping it off was hitting up the McDonald's for a large sweet tea.  Sweet tea never tasted so good!