RED CLIFF, COLORADO
The Red Cliff Bridge lies on Highway 24 between Leadville
and I-70 in Colorado. The bridge was built in 1940 and its now on the National
Register of Historic Places and that helped garner up some help paying the tab when
$3.6 million in renovations happened in 2004. What that means is all of us
(USA) pay for repairs like this where as renovations to the streets where we
live are paid almost entirely with local dollars. Bleh. Enough with the civics
and onto the bridge itself.
We were in the midst of changing campgrounds and had two
choices to get to our next campground. The gps told us to go right and take 91
which would get us there quicker even though it was a couple more miles.
Usually I’m all about quicker but in this instance I decided to go with my gut
and it was telling me take door number left. Well just up the road from Minturn
there is a little town called Red Cliff and this bridge is there and it’s a pretty
darn cool place to take a picture. Its hard to not take a good picture there.
The setting does all the work. Just make sure you don’t block the lense with
fingers, hands or people standing in the way and you’re good. The take away
here is don’t always go where the gps tells you to go. You just might miss
something worthwhile.
Driving thru we decided that we needed to go back and have a
further look and more opportunities to take pictures. We met up with my sisters
family for a day (they were starting their trip and we were ending ours) and
this is part of what we saw in our loop drive from Gore Creek Campground (Vail)
to Leadville to Copper Mountain and back to the campground. Our fellow
explorers for the day have a DJI Phantom quadricopter (drone) with a slick
GoPro attached. We pulled off at a turn off and they took it out for a short
fly. What you see in this video is the second attempt which goes fairly smooth.
You’ll hear Curt almost immediately nervously suspect a bad blade which was not
the case. This nervousness is due to some issues that were had just previous to
this due to some sort of configurations problems which led to difficulties
controlling it. What ended up as funny could have turned tragic. Curt was on
the ledge of the cliff reaching out for the copter as Jack was having a
difficult time getting it back to base and for a few seconds I thought Curt was
going to jump off the cliff and attempt to pull it down with no concern for
going over and off that cliff. I’m pretty sure that the copter would have been
unable to hold or lift Curt to safety. I actually was filming during the period
leading up to this but turned the camera off as the energy was turning more
serious and dramatic. Ahhh if only I would have kept filming I might have ended
up with someone seriously funny and worthy of a million views. But that wasn’t to
be the case. Lesson learned though. Next time keep filming no matter what!
So here is the video. What a sweet location. Videos never do
justice to what you see in person. I’d like to get a hold of the video they have
from the copters view point and post it here. We’ll see if I can get my hands
on that.
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