A loop through what the mines left
An All-American Road in Colorado, one of 16 scenic routes mapped in the state, touching seven units of park and public land on a single loop.
The San Juan Skyway is a loop, and what it loops through is an industry that stopped. The surfaced places say so plainly: a Historic Mine Cart, the Corkscrew Gulch Turntable, the Pioneer Museum, the Animas Museum, the Telluride Historical Museum, the Powerhouse Science Centre.
Four museums on one loop is not a region with a lot of history. It is a region with a lot of buildings that needed a second use.
The shape of the leftovers
A turntable is the giveaway. You build one where a railway has to reverse a locomotive in a space too narrow to turn it — which is to say, in a gulch, on a line that exists to move ore. Nobody lays that for scenery.
The hot springs sit in the same account: Rico 1, Rico 2 and Orvis Hot Spring. Water that comes up warm is the reason some of these towns were findable at all, and it is what several of them sell now.
Seven units of public land on one loop
Against the committed boundaries the corridor comes within reach of Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area, and three national forests — San Juan, Rio Grande, and Grand Mesa Uncompahgre and Gunnison.
Seven, on a road you can drive back to where you started. That is the argument for a loop over an out-and-back: the same day buys you a different set of public land in every quarter of it.
Five overlooks, high up
Gold Point. Twilight Peak. Molas Pass. Red Mountain Overlook. Look Out Point. Two of the five are named for a pass or a peak, one for a colour of rock, and one — Gold Point — for the thing everybody came here to find.
The song
Volume 008 of the byway series is Go Around Again. On the only one of these roads that returns you to where you started, it is less a sentiment than an instruction.