Hi, all -- By road, the correctional facility is about 25 miles to Salida from Buena Vista.
If you take Highway 285 from Buena Vista to Salida, you can bypass Salida and end up in Poncha Springs; a left turn at the junction of 285 and Highway 50 takes you another 12 miles to Maysville. SM's house is not right on Highway 50; from satellite photos, you have to turn onto another road and then drive a bit -- someone made a map from Google satellite photos showing that back in Thread 1 or 2 here. There does not appear to be direct access from 50 to her house. It's wooded and hilly, and though you could probably walk down the backside of a hill and get to 50, you'd have to drive on the available road to get there by car.
The correctional facility sits near the junction of 285 and Highway 24; there's a lot of heavy truck traffic and other traffic at that intersection, as 285 is how you get to Denver and 24 is how you get to Leadville and the mountain communities past that along I-70.
You can see the <a href="
خرائط Google">satellite image of the facility and the highways on Google.</a>
Click the satellite image in the lower left corner to see how it looks topographically. (did that link come through?)
The facility has been in this area for decades. Not sure what its procedures are for release, but most likely they'll have to have family or friends come to pick them up. There is car service in this area -- Uber and Lyft -- and I just looked up how much it would cost to get to Salida from BV via Lyft. It's about $35, which is probably prohibitive for somebody just getting released from prison. But the inmate might not be from the immediate area, so they'd probably have to get it figured out.
PrisonPro notes that it's considered a minimum security facility that houses inmates soon slated for release and that the primary function of the facility is to prepare inmates for that release:
Buena Vista Correctional Complex Visiting hours, inmate phones, mail
Also, there is at least one known inmate who was quarantined last month because he tested positive for COVID-19. He was a transfer from Denver, according to Cañon City Daily Record:
Department of Corrections says inmate in Buena Vista tests positive for COVID-19 – Canon City Daily Record