When your brakes fail, it might as well be on a winding mountain pass with sheer drop offs and hairpin bends. Even better if it is a pass that climbs from near to sea level up to almost 3000m, before dropping back down to below 1500m. (That’s pushing 10,000′ before returning to less than 5000′ for those of you who have not gleefully embraced the metric system.)
There comes a time in two perfectly reasonable people’s lives when they decide that driving cross-country to New York is a sensible thing to do. “Now wait a minute” I hear you exclaim “Aren’t you driving to Argentina? That is quite a lot further away from Alaska than New York and therefore a slightly madder thing to do!” I’ll grant you that the plan of driving to Argentina does sound a little crazy, but ultimately it comes down to a question of timeframes.
Having spent far too long faffing about in Utah and Nevada our time in Colorado was short. (That was about the only thing that was short in Colorado—everything else appeared to be of record-breaking height.) After visiting Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah side, we had been considering driving to Echo Park on the Colorado side of the park—but we were told that the road was closed. No surprise there, that had happened a lot lately.