Sunday night Katie took me to Mt. Evans for a quiet evening together. Our goal was to overlook the Denver skyline, grab a few pics of stars and enjoy each others company.
Most of the 28 mile journey was pleasant and uneventful. The road got narrow and windy as we approached the summit. Once we passed the fee station things changed drastically. Our attention changed from watching for deer to trying to see the road! We had litterally driven into the clouds.
Katie was driving while I pressed my face against the windshield to try and see the road in front of us. Crawling along at an inch-worm pace, we strattled the solid yellow line as it led the way up. We were unable to see the edge of the road and any signs we saw didn't appear until they were about twenty feet from the car.
As we neared Summit Lake, our hearts skipped and raced as the solid yellow line gave way to a dotted line. As one line disappeared from view, it seemed like several seconds before the next line began to appear.
Katie kept the car crawling until we got to the lake area. The clouds finally broke leaving us in pitch black, but at least we could see more the ten feet in front of the car.
Since we thought we were above the clouds, we decided to press on to the top. Five hundred feet later we hit more clouds. Unable to see and quickly deteriorating road conditions, we decided to turn around. Only problem is how do you turn around on a mountain road that is pitch black, fogged in and you're unable to see the edges of the road?
Simple. I got out of the car and walked to each edge of the road to size up the area we had to work with. The only thing I ciould see was the glow of the headlights and taillights. While physically holding on to the front fender of the car, I directed Katie to turn hard left and I walked her forward about 8 steps. Then she cranked the wheel the other way while I moved to the back fender. This time I walked her back about 14 steps. We repeated the process until the car was turned around. I hopped back in the car and we inched our way back down the mountain.
When we got out of the nerve racking worst of it, we pulled out her camera and snapped a few pics. Check out her flickr stream for those.
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