CO Road-trip 2012: Day 10

amazing. I ordered my usual enchilada plate and B ordered an awesome carne asada and shrimp dish that we can't remember the name of. The best part of her dish was the bright orange sauce that came with it. I also had an Especial and B had a Margarita. Back at the hotel we relaxed and digested our food.

We woke up and checked out of our hotel in no rush. We headed out with the plan of driving to Maroon Lake to see the Maroon Bells. What we didn't realize was that they close the road every morning during the tourist season at 9am afterwhich they require everyone to buy bus tickets to be taken to the lake. We also found out later that this was the last day that they were limiting the number of people going to the lake. Lucky us. We arrived at the road closure at 9:30am and were a little put off. We bought our $6/person tickets and walked outside to find a bus loading people. At least they allowed dogs on the shuttles. The shuttle ride wasn't that bad and we were given a little history of the area as we went, but I would have liked to have been able to pull over and take pictures as we went. We were dropped off just east of the lake, so we made the short walk to it. The Maroon Bells are two beautiful peaks that rise above Maroon Lake. Maroon Lake on this day was pretty low. We spent a little over an hour walking around and taking the short nature loop upstream of the lake before catching another shuttle back to our car. By this time it was near lunch so we drove back into Aspen and stopped at New York Pizza. The pizza was pretty good and the slices were huge. After this we said our goodbyes to Aspen and headed NW on CO-82 before turning on Watson Divide Road to get to County Road 9. There were a couple of nice viewpoints from Watson Divide Road. We definitely wouldn't mind living in this area. We turned north onto County Road 11 and then west onto County Road 9. We then followed County Road 9 to a viewpoint up Capitol Creek Canyon near the end of the road. We were probably about a week or so late to see the golden aspens and most of the trees were bare. However, the views were still nice. After taking a few pictures, we continued up the steep and rutted road just a little ways further to another viewpoint that had no cars at it. This second viewpoint was better but the road was in pretty bad shape. After enjoying this second viewpoint to ourselves for a little while we decided it was time to move on.

We hooked back onto CO-82 and took it north to I-70, which we took west to Grand Junction. We checked into our hotel in Grand Junction and drove to El Tapatio for dinner. The food was