Gold Belt Tour
Shelf Road Part 1

Coming from the north, the beginning of Shelf Road was pretty gentle but it quickly began to descend and the granite started to poke out through the heavy tree cover. The tree cover is mostly lodgepole pine and blue spruce but there's some Ponderosa, some stands of aspen and lots of mountain mahogany and Gambel oak for underbrush. Most of this section of the road is along the edge of the creek bed and is really lush but as the canyon gets deeper, the tree cover slowly gives way to more and more rock. And a lot of that rock is pretty spectacular. It didn't matter that I'd seen so much granite just a few hours ago in Phantom Canyon, the display in this canyon was different.