Gold Belt Tour
Shelf Road Part 1

Shelf Road was another great surprise for me. Leaving Cripple Creek, I headed back toward Victor on SR 67. At the south edge of Cripple Creek I passed a road going south that had signs for hiking and camping access but nothing about Shelf Road (that turned out to be the very northern end of Shelf Road). As I was coming up on Anaconda, I stopped and pulled out a map to see where I was. In the middle of the big curve ahead of me was a road to the right that turned out to be the next access to Shelf Road. Maybe half a mile in, the two roads came together and headed south into the canyon.

This first part was pretty good road but because it wasn't an old railroad bed, it didn't pay the same attention to slope and sharpness of curve as I'd found on Phantom Canyon Road. This first part wasn't as narrow as some parts of Phantom Canyon had been, either. Other than that, the topography was very similar, as was the presence of the granite. Once I really got started down into the canyon, the tree cover began to give way to more and more exposed granite. This photo with the Trailblazer is meant to give some scale to the granite sticking up. But this chunk of rock is nothing to the wall that contains Window Rock. I'd seen photos of Window Rock before but none of them did real justice to the presence of that granite wall, nor to the size and depth of the window. It's one of those things that you just have to go there and see and feel for yourself.

This first page of Shelf Road photos takes you from just below Anaconda to just below Window Rock, but not quite to that area of the road where Shelf Road got its' name from. For that part of the journey, you'll need to go to Shelf Road Part 2.