I'm not sure what this is, but I took its picture!
As we got down into the valleys, there were little hamlets dotting the landscape, mostly alongside the river. They all offered whitewater rafting or other outdoor adventures. Llamas seem to be the pack animal of choice, probably because they're so well adapted to altitude, being native to the higher elevations of the Andes. They mostly all seemed to sport more RVs and motor homes than fixed structures, leading me to believe they may become veritable ghost towns in the winter.
Not a fast food joint to be seen all the way south, which wasn't a problem. Little mom and pop places tend to be better, and we found some good homestyle hamburgers at a stand by the side of the road. As we climbed back up to the snow line and altitude, I started feeling short of breath and developed the tell-tale headache of altitude sickness. I've had the headache before, up in the higher Andes, but this was the first time I had ever gotten short of breath just from altitude. Thankfully, we have a portable oxygen concentrator just for use at altitude. A few minutes sucking on oxygen helped, but we weren't that high up for long.
Once we turned west again, heading toward Durango, the hamlets turned into towns with groceries, fixed homes, fast food, and definite signs of a style all their own, along with some pretty eclectic menus! Still plenty of RVs and motor homes, indicating that their population drops tremendously in the winter, the exact opposite of Silver Springs, Florida, where the population more than doubles in the winter!
Of course, every mountain range has a Chimney Rock. This is the most phallic looking one I've seen. I didn't get a shot of it in the beginning, where there are trees or something that make the shape of two round spheres on either side of the base of Chimney Rock. I was too busy staring at it wondering what they could have possibly named the formation!
We spent a few days just outside of Durango with some close friends. Until this day, the only time I had ever had difficulty with altitude was on Monserrate Serra outside of Bogota, Columbia, which is just over 10,000 feet. Even then, I just got the headache. I did not feel short of breath, and coming back down from the very tip top to the cable car point, the headache went away. While I wasn't air hungry around Durango, I definitely had no exercise capacity and tended to have difficulty breathing with just normal walking. That put a damper on the things we were able to do with our friends, but we did enjoy the visit. In spite of having difficulty, we drove around the area and saw some of the sights.
One of the best was Pinkerton Hot Springs just outside of Durango. Bruce and our friends helped me navigate around it, but out of fear of falling and breaking something again, I didn't go down the hill where the water runs as it leaves the rock pile. Scientists are not sure whether this spring actually reaches magma before returning to the Earth's surface, but it stays a consistent 95 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Definitely warm water coming up, even though it was cold and rainy when we went. The rock pile was constructed over the spring's exit from the ground in the 1800s by James Pinkerton. Over time, the rocks have been eroded and colored by the minerals from the spring. It's definitely an awesome sight to see, and the pictures don't do it justice. I'm really looking forward to going back and spending some time with it when I'm in better shape and the weather's more amenable to playing in water.
We had lunch at a restaurant in a neat little hotel called The Strater Hotel. Definitely Old West themed. The food was mediocre, but the ambiance of the hotel was really fun. They even had an old kinetoscope that was loaded with a Charlie Chaplin film. The light was blown, so we thought it was broken - that is until Bruce turned on the flashlight on his phone and held it over the window. I'll close with some shots of some antiques in the hotel.
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