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| Ruth Moorhead | profile | all galleries >> Colorado >> Cottonwood Pass | tree view | thumbnails | slideshow |
Porcupines woke us both nights, partaking of the grease on my VW's CV joints, and had to be shooed away several times.
We think they spent their daytime hours among the krumholtzed spruces cloaking the ridges above us.
As of the 2019 completion of roadway paving from the other side, Cottonwood Pass took up the position formerly held
by Independence Pass as the nation's (and possibly the continent's) highest paved pass (other paved roads are higher; they're just not passes).
We returned in August the next year, driving on some of that new pavement, and enjoying a hiking spot vastly less populated than the one at the top of the pass.
 Looking Into Gunnison NF |
 Part of the San Ysabel NF |
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 Two Trails in One |
 Collegiate Peaks Wilderness |
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 Old Man of the Mountain |
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 Alpine Forget-me-not |
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 Winter's Rodent Burrows |
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 Collegiate Peaks |
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 Colorado Blue Columbine, Aquilegia caerulea |
 More Rodent Trails |
 Globeflower, Trollius albiflorus |
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 Male (pollen) cones |
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 A Continuum of Cones |
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 Engelmann Spruce |
 AlpLily, Lloydia serotina |
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 An Alpine Vaccinium sp. |
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 Viola adunca, Mountain Blue Violet |
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 Trifolium sp. |
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 Collegiate Peaks, Chaffee County, Colorado |
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 Collegiate Peaks, Chaffee County, Colorado |
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 Willows |
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