After a sneaky backdoor departure and stop at the variety store for their purchases the couple was on their way. Cynthia toted her camera equipment, in part at least as an excuse for the trip should they be questioned. The day was magnificent and the cool morning air as sharp as a knife. The topless Jeep offered an unfettered view of the spectacular scenery they entered as soon as they left the highway.
"It always amazes me," Cynthia said with a sigh and a smile, "when we leave the pavement, it's an entirely different world. I loathe these horrible roads, but I love the places they take you," then, remembering their destination, she added, "on most trips."
The roads, if you could charitably call them such, had been cut a hundred years past by men who knew only their boots or a burro for transportation and had never seen a motorized vehicle, even one as hardy as a Jeep. But thanks to their quest for gold, the entire region was now traversed by hundreds of semi-navigable trails, open to those who dared venture from the blacktop of civilization to the timeless beauty of an unchanged world.
Dean never made the off road climb into the San Juans without remembering his first back-country voyage with Cynthia the year before. The couple was newly married, Bird Song still under construction, and with Fred out of town, they stole two days on a camping honeymoon. While Cynthia was apprehensive over the wildness of the area, once there, the stark beauty that engulfed her dispelled her earlier trepidation. It was not an uncommon reaction. In spite of the breath-catching vertical drop-offs, boulder-strewn tilting and rolling Jeep roads with their impossible angles of ascent, the solitude of being able to stare for miles and miles in any directions with not a soul in sight-all this melted away to a sense of awe and peace that made any anxiety evaporate like mountain mist on a summer morning. A heavenly experience, if their destination had been different.
As they climbed higher, the display of wildflowers grew in bounty and brilliance, blanketing the basin in a generosity of color. Indian paintbrush, lupine, fireweed, columbine, all dancing in radiance with occasional hummingbirds cavorting from feast to feast, their red throats sparkling in the sun. Dean knew Cynthia desperately wanted to photograph the display but both knew time was a factor if they were to visit the mine before the Dawkinses were free of their legal meetings to make the trip themselves.
"As beautiful as it is," Dean said, "it feels more like a Harrison Ford movie than a travelogue." He pulled the vehicle to the elbow of a switchback. A hundred yards ahead of them the infrequently used Jeep road became impassable in a washed-out jumble of stone. "End of the line," Dean said as he studied Martha's map. "The Dawkinses aren't fighting over this place because of its accessibility."