Not fun and a little scary

We drove to Mt. Evans today. It is the highest paved road in the US. This was fun and not scary. The scenery was breathtaking, and I mean literally. The end of the road was over 14,000 ft. We didn’t stay long since it was in the high 30’s to low 40’s and the wind was blowing a gale. Of course being seasoned experienced travelers we didn’t have any jackets in the Jeep. Now for the scary part. On the way back down from Mt. Evans I noticed there was a 4 wheel drive road about 10 miles from Idaho Springs. The name should have been warning enough, it was Devil’s Canyon Road. The second warning should have been that someone had swiped the sign to the road, but of course being the seasoned experienced 4 wheeler that I am, I totally ignored the warnings. The road started out as rough but not much of a 4 wheel trail, in fact, I remarked to Twila that a high clearance SUV could do it. Well, we came to a junction in the road where we could go left or right. We had a National Forest hand out map that show a road to the left, one to the right and one in the middle, so being a good Republican, I went to the right. No problem, still about the same as far as the road went. Then we came to another junction with 2 or 3 options. I picked the one that looked the easiest and we continued on. Before I knew what had happened, I was on a fairly rough road with no place to turn around and then all hell broke loose. I came to a section that luckily was down hill cause I don’t think my “Baby Jeep” could have made it going up hill. It was really bad, large rocks everywhere, I was sure wishing I had gone ahead and put skid plates on. Since I was going down hill I was able to go really slow using the brakes to easy over the rocks. Yes I did drag in places but we made it. Twila even moved some rocks that were small enough yet large enough I was afraid I would get them caught under the Jeep. We made it and the road got better except we came to another junction. Again 3 choices, this time I took the middle road, about 35 minutes later and an abundant of bad road we figured out we had made a long loop. By this time we were both thinking we might spent the night on the mountain. We were thinking it but not saying it. When we figured out we had made a loop that eliminated 2 of the three option we had before the loop. Being the great mathematician that I am that only left one road so we took it and about 1/8 of a mile down the road we came to another junction. We didn’t like the looks of the one to the right so we went straight ahead. We finally came to what I thought was the first junction we had made and sure enough we finally found the highway again. We both screamed for joy. Lesson learned, never take a trail that isn’t in my 4 wheel drive book or I am with someone else that knows the trail. I am worn out and only about half of it is from the driving. I think the rest was from being afraid we wouldn’t find our way out before dark.