Just a word of warning on St. Elmo looking like a short drive in the truck. If you are looking at going over Tincup Pass this is one rough road.

I have a cabin in Pitkin so we fish a lot in the area. My wife has always wanted to go to St. Elmo, so two years ago we are fishing at Mirror Lake which is 3 miles above Tincup so from there to top of Tincup pass is 4 miles. We were there on July 3, and we made it to the top of the pass and here is a guy on a 4-wheeler throwing rocks into a pot hole. Got to talking to him and he runs the rental shop at St. Elmo. He said that there was no way to get on across in the pickup, that the 4 wheelers had just made it through the snow drifts that day. So we turn around on top and head back down. Took us about 1 1/2 hours to travel this 8 mile stretch in my 98 Dodge.

Last year we rented 4 wheelers and tried going over Hancock pass. This would have been around the 20th of June. Made it to about 200 yards from the top and the snow was still about 4 ft. deep.

Hopefully this year she will get to see St. Elmo. I sent an email to the St. Elmo General store last week but have not gotten a reply yet as to how much snow they still have up there. Will be going up this weekend to open up the cabin and then going back the last week of June for vacation so the new 4 wheeler is going to get a try out at high altitude.

 

ya I wouldent recomend driving a truck over Tin Cup. I have seen bone stock full size trucks up there but they wherent moving real fast. On an ATV it is a short easy ride.

Johnswoodshop. To bad you dident try Hanckok pass 1 week later last year because it was open. Not because it melted but because 6 of us from Iowa scooped it open in a last ditch atemet to get to St Elmo. It took 6 of us scooping for a good hour and a half to get threw. We dug a trench exactly the width of the ATVs threw the drift and abought 4 feet deep for a good 100 feet. I never go to Colorado that early in the year without a scoop shuvel straped to the machine.