Shelf Road
We started out our day in Cripple Creek to visit the Ice Festival. It was a very nice day with temperatures around 50 degrees with sunny skies. After some time walking around the ice festival we were on our way to the first trail of the day.
We started the trail from the north end up by Cripple Creek. Shelf Road is a nice, easygoing trail at its start. We only found a few spots of snow on the trail. It was mostly just wet and a little muddy in places. None of us had any issues with all the switchbacks at the north end of the trail.
We did get to see the window in the rock way above the trail, which was cool. We also had some excellent views of the mountain ranges to the southwest of us.
Eventually, we got to the "shelf" part of Shelf Road. Our passengers were all by the wall to one side of the trail while the drivers had the scary side of the trail with the big drop off.
As we got closer to the end of Shelf Road we passed a state police car and a fire department truck parked at the side of the road. It sure made us wonder what was going on. Next we had to stop for a big front loader that was removing a rock slide from the trail. On the other side of the rock slide was an ambulance and another State Police car. We wondered if someone had driven off of the shelf road but we didn't see any vehicles down below us. We never did find out what was going on with the rock slide. They eventually cleared the debris from the trail and we were moving again.
At the end of the Shelf Road trail we stopped in the parking lot at the beginning of The Bank trail and we had lunch there. After lunch we started our way down The Bank just to find out that the gates were closed at the camping area. So we turned around and headed off to Phantom Canyon.
Reports from Other Days: 13
Use the arrows or dots to flip through the previews of the other reports for Shelf Road. Click one of them to read more and see all of the photos from that day.
