a town called Guppy.

You don't have to click the pic, but you'll feel better if you do.

Before I got to Guffey I drove through Hartsell, another tiny town on the road to somewhere else. There's not much here, a gas station, a place to eat and a lot of boarded-up buildings like this old gas station. Going through Hartsell is like going back in time, which is a great way to get prepared for the town of Guffey.

After spending the night at my property, I drove the 30 miles to Guffey Colorado to take a few pictures of the old buildings. Yes it's real name is Guffey but the locals have always called it Guppy. After hanging around Guffey for a while, I drove over to FairPlay to see if I could find some national forest boondocking somewhere, and boy was I surprised.

 I can honestly say that in the thirty-something years I've lived and traveled in Colorado, I have never seen as many cars and people running around as there are now.  On certain days such as the 4th of July weekend or during the fall leaf season, those days are hectic. But these are just ordinary everyday tourists in a typical middle of July. There's more than I've ever seen, and remember, I used to be in the tourist business, so I kept up with that sort of thing.

It just makes sense that it's got something to do with the Bat flu problems. Maybe these folks are tired of being cooped up, possibly leaving states where they're not allowed to do anything, maybe getting out in the open air of the mountains sounds like a safe thing to do. I don't know what it is, but things are crowded enough that running around in the mountains is not any fun for me.

I had planned on hanging around in the mountains until Monday morning and then return to Denver. But, it was so crowded where I was on Saturday that I headed back to Denver to get away from all the people and traffic. I figured with the mountains looking like they were, there couldn't be many people left in Denver.

So what am I to do? I would like to take a mini-vacation, but now I'm worried that any place worth going to might be so busy it would be no fun for me. And finding a place to boondock that wasn't crowded might be impossible.

Like I've said many times in the past. Tourist season in Colorado ends the second week of August so people can get the kids back in school. So late August is a good time for me to go running around in the high country. But now some places are talking about not opening the schools. If that's the case will all these hordes of people stay here until the snow drives them away? Will they ever go home? Will people leave those horrible, dangerous big cities and move to Colorado. Will they bring their big-city ideas with them and turn Colorado into the same kind of dump they just left?

These and many other questions remain to be answered. And at my age, I seriously doubt if I'll be around to find out what the answers will be, which is fine with me because I probably wouldn't like the answers anyway.

                           theboondork

There's a lot of old houses and cabins in Hartsel that are empty because there's really not many reasons to live here. But their interesting to see, and take pictures of, and start to get the feelings of the way things used to be.

It's pretty hard to tell what this is. Is it a home? A ranch? A fort? But there's two things I know for sure.... Fire insurance must be impossible to get. And there's places in Hartsel even more run down than this.

Some folks think that guns won the West, others think it was the trains. But this is what really won the West.... The wind powered water pump, this one is missing its blades. Without the water, all the other stuff wouldn't have existed.

   And now, on to Guppy.