Extremes of Weather on Mt. Evans

Every Spring my husband and I like to take a drive up to the summit of the 14,271 (4350 m) high Mt. Evans. Mt. Evans is located 60 miles west of Denver, Colorado, and the total elevation gain from the high plains on which Denver sits, to the summit of Mt. Evans, will take you up 9,000 feet! From Idaho Springs one travels south on CO Hwy. 103 to the junction of CO Hwy. 5, the entrance to Mount Evans Road, where I took the photo above. We were late this year, on our first journey up the mountain, as it was June 22, the first full day of summer.  The temperature was in the low 80's and the sky was blue with fluffy clouds.

The Mt Evans Scenic Byway is the highest paved road in North America. Because of snow, the road is only open from Memorial Day in May to Labor Day in September. You can see blogs I wrote about our journey up the mountain here and here.  If you look at those blog posts you will see that we usually have an enjoyable and scenic drive, full of wildflowers, and wildlife, but this trip was going to be very different!

As we drove the sky began to fill with heavy dark clouds and the temperature began to drop quickly.

As you can see from our car dashboard, the temperature dropped to 32 degrees (0 C) as we approached the Summit Lake elevation of 12,936 feet (3,912 m)

As we continued on the winding road the heavy dark clouds seemed so low that we could almost touch them.

Since we were now on the narrowest part of the Mt. Evans road there was nothing we could do but continue to drive. There was traffic on the road going up and down and nowhere to turn around, on this narrow road with no guardrails.

It was scary! The wind was fierce and the snow was blowing in whiteout conditions.

If you watch the video above, that I posted on my facebook page here, you can see and hear the conditions we were driving in! As much as we heard over the years that mountain weather can change drastically in just a few minutes, this was the first time that we experienced it!

We finally reached the summit parking lot area, where we were able to turn around and go back down in elevation, below the storm.

Before we left we took a photo of the iconic sign in the parking lot--you can see it has snow on it.

We wouldn't be stopping to climb the rest of the elevation to the top of the mountain this time!

As we drove down the mountain we breathed a sigh of relief that we weren't being hit by hail. We could actually see the storm beginning to pass by off to the east. This was definitely an experience we would never forget and made us respect the power of elevation and weather extremes that can happen at any time.  

Our journey down the mountain continued and thankfully improved, but that will be saved for my next post.

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