Gold Belt Tour
Shelf Road Part 2

On this page I am continuing my journey down Shelf Road, from just below Window Rock to the southern end of Garden Park. This is a spectacular drive but if you have any kind of uneasiness about driving along a narrow cliff edge with a good drop right outside your window, don't do it. Coming from the north down past Window Rock to Marigold is one thing but once you cross the stream below Marigold, you're pretty much committed: for the next few miles there's nowhere wide enough to turn around. And don't come in here with a big rig or towing a trailer, you won't have a chance.

Past Window Rock, the canyon gets deeper and narrower until you come into the area of Marigold. I think Marigold was another small gold mining camp but there isn't much left to indicate that people ever lived here. It is a beautiful open area where I stopped for a few to take a break from the driving.

The Carlton Tunnel comes out of Squaw Mountain, just above Victor, and travels a straight line southwest to where it exits the granite just above Marigold. I don't know if this was an old water channel or one of the gold mine shafts that just kept going and going and going... It also makes me wonder if Marigold was a construction camp set up for folks working at the southern outlet of the Carlton Tunnel, going into the granite to eventually meet up with the miners coming down from the northeast.

At the south end of the Marigold area the canyon walls closed in again. There was a Texas crossing to get over a sizable streamflow (they put Texas crossings in places where the roadbeds tend to get washed out a lot from flash floods and such) and then the road got busy hugging the side of the canyon wall again. Somewhere down here was a clump of signage warning folks to not go any further with big rigs or trailers, and then the road immediately proved the value of paying attention to those signs.

For the next few miles I got to live the experience of why this is named "Shelf Road." It is single track dirt and gravel with very few pullouts to let vehicles pass, never mind try to turn one around. Once you drive into this, bite the bullet and just keep on driving no matter how white your knuckles get. There are a couple of places to stop and take a break and it's only a few miles long. And those few miles are gorgeous if you can look to see it.

I found even less traffic on Shelf Road than I did on Phantom Canyon Road. Part of that may be due to the total lack of signage at both ends of Shelf Road marking the road as either Shelf Road or as part of the Gold Belt Tour Scenic Byway. There were Scenic Byway signs in Cripple Creek, Victor, Florence and Cañon City but none anywhere in the vicinity of Shelf Road. I can understand the safety concerns becaue of the narrowness of the road (and the proximity of the drop-offs) but folks are missing an incredible drive through some simply spectacular countryside.