Thunder tumbled down the San Juan Mountains, heralding the arrival of pelting rain that turned the Jeep road into a surging stream and the sky to an ominous shade of raven black.
A portion of one of the expeditions he despatched, under Juan de Ayolas, pushing up the Paraguay, is said to have reached the south-east districts of Peru, but while returning laden with booty, was attacked by the Payagua Indians, and every man perished.
Reaching the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan, Drake proceeded northward along the west coast of America, resolved to attempt the discovery of a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The coast from the southern extremity of the Californian peninsula to Cape Mendocino had been discovered by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and Francisco de Ulloa in 1539.
The Uncompahgre Gorge, a deep and narrow cut in the rock of the San Juan Mountains, hugged in its confines, a river of the same name.
The highway to Pagosa Springs followed the San Juan River up the pass to the top of the Rocky Mountains while side streams, arush with melting snow, ice cold to the touch, cascaded down from the roof of the sky, thousands of feet above.
