OURAY — My inner monologue was showing as I piloted our burly blue Jeep alongside a cliff, and it was a little embarrassing.
“I don’t know how deep that puddle is,” I said as I rolled toward a 2-foot-wide water-filled hole in the dirt road. (Note: We hadn’t even hit the four-wheeling proper yet. Soon I’d be pointing the Jeep’s passenger side wheels up onto rocks, creating a tippy state that made me wonder whether it would help if I leaned my torso uphill just a little.) My friend Piper, who was joining me for this jeeping adventure in the mountains around Ouray, laughed at me outright.
“We could roll this Jeep over another Jeep,” she said. “I think it can handle a puddle.”
It’s true, we probably could have rolled our Jeep over another four-wheel-drive vehicle. When we arrived at that morning to pick up our rental, owner Jeff Lindberg informed us that we had received a free upgrade because they had overbooked themselves for the day. “You get to take out my Jeep,” he said. Lindberg’s primo Jeep normally goes out for $350 a day, but we were getting it for the $195 we had already pledged … for some Jeep we could have driven right over in this nicer one, I guess.
That Colorado West was booked solid for the day was no surprise — it was Fourth of July weekend, and we were participating in one of Ouray’s most popular tourism draws. I’m used to going to Ouray in the winter for the town’s other seasonal attraction, ice climbing. But through the summer and fall, jeeping is a big deal here — such a big deal that Ouray bills itself as the Jeep capital of the world.
Jeeping was new to me, but it’s old hat in Ouray.
“The jeeping tradition goes back to the 1940s, when the first Willys came back from overseas during World War II,” said Heidi Pankow of the Ouray Chamber Resort Association. Ouray’s , the town’s oldest Jeep-tour company, has been around since that time. It started in 1946.
And speaking of jeeping experience, I didn’t realize this before I asked Piper to join me, but she knew what she was doing on these roads. I should have known — she has climbed most of the fourteeners in Colorado, and many of them are accessed most easily via rough roads. When I asked her to get behind the wheel so I could take pictures of her driving across a creek, she got a little giddy, and I knew I had a monster on my hands.
We decided to head down to town to retrieve my sunscreen, which I had left in Ouray (problematic after we spent a good 15 minutes figuring out how to get the big blue Jeep’s hard top off, as passers-by gave us looks that said, “You two know what you’re doing?”) and head out to Corkscrew Gulch, a drive Lindberg had enthusiastically called “super fun.” When the road down Imogene turned into a regular gravel road again, Piper threw the Jeep into two-wheel-drive. We came over a rise and gained more speed on the downhill on the other side. I laughed nervously and gave her a look (Please slow down, this isn’t our Jeep!) right as we both noticed flashing lights in the mirrors.
“You were doing 36 in a 20,” said the police officer who pulled us over. We realized neither of us knew there was a speed limit, although, of course, there was — every road has one, even dirt backcountry byways.
After getting off with a mere warning (whew!), we headed south, toward Red Mountain Pass, to drive Corkscrew Gulch … with me behind the wheel, being very mindful of the speed limit.
Corkscrew climbed into the forest along a muddy track with roller-coaster dips and rises. We were getting bounced around more now, and the wheels were hitting the mud puddles with an exciting splash. We still had the top off the Jeep, in a case in the trunk, which made it easier to see the moonscape scree fields that streak mountains in the San Juans. But as we crossed one of those stripes of stark landscape, we realized that an afternoon storm was about to dump rain on us. We rolled up to a wide spot on the road right as the rain started in earnest and whipped the top out of the trunk like a pit crew. The Jeep had a roof again in mere minutes. I let myself feel slightly accomplished, despite my nervous pondering about the depth of a puddle at the start of the day.
We read in our guide book that there were steep switchbacks heading up to a pass ahead of us, above treeline. I took a deep breath and pointed the Jeep uphill once again, because once you’re up high in these rainbow-hued hills, you want to keep going, to see more. The switchbacks were tight, as advertised, but the Jeep handled them like a champ; not so for a pair of motorcycles in front of us, one of which had washed out and presumably dumped the rider in the gravel. The riders were struggling to pick up the bike and pull it out of the road when I rounded one of the switchbacks.
I parked at the pass, where other roads branched off up a ridge, down a valley, toward another pass. The rain had moved on, so we stepped out to enjoy the scenery at 12,000 feet.
I asked Piper to drive us back down the switchbacks, a task I knew would be more challenging. (Despite the earlier speeding, I should note that she’s not reckless, just confident.) She navigated the tricky bits with her own monologue, telling me why she was aiming the Jeep one way so it wouldn’t tip quite so far to one side, pulling partway into a switchback before reversing the Jeep a bit — they were very tight — to make the rest of the turn. For us, driving the Jeep ourselves rather than taking a tour was the best choice. It was more nerve-wracking for me, for sure, but also tons of fun, and I had learned a few things along the way: Don’t stop in a creek; don’t aim a tire at a big rock you can’t straddle; obey all traffic laws.
And: Sometimes it’s smart to give the keys to the monster.
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jennfields
If you go
Colorado West Jeeps: Tours and rentals available. Maybe take a tour if the friend you plan to Jeep with has a lead foot. 701 Main St., Ouray, 970-325-4014, coloradowestJeeps.com
