This morning, everyone sort of slept in. That is to say, Ellen was asleep until just before I went down to breakfast. Phoebe woke but was mostly quiet. I was awake by 5am, but I tried to sleep in until 5:50 when I went to shower. I took the girls down for breakfast. Just dry scrambled eggs and bacon for the hot stuff. Their waffle maker wasn’t working, but I didn’t really want one anyway. We got packed up. When I went out to the car, it was cloudy, cool, and sprinkling ever so slightly. We were on the road by 7:30am after a missed exit by me to get to highway 24 west. However, we got there, and we were in the sun by the time we got out of the canyon that runs past Garden of the Gods, the cliff dwellings, Cave of the Winds, and Pike’s Peak (which, by the way, has a place called the North Pole at the base. I don’t get it). Plus we finally had a full view of Pike’s Peak without any clouds at the top.
Yesterday, we had decided to go to the Florissant Fossil Beds National Park which is just outside of the town of Florissant since it was on the way back to highway 70 and our trip across Colorado to Grand Junction. Or, at least, we made it on our way. It wasn’t very far from Colorado Springs, and we arrived around 8:30am. Entry fee was $3 for each adult. The girls were free since they were under 12. We got personal attention from the rangers there. As the girls got set up to start their Junior Ranger booklets, I chatted with one of the other rangers about our trip. He suggested, since we were heading west to Grand Junction anyway, that we skip I-70 and take highway 50 west instead so that we could go through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park as well. He used to work there. He also gave me a suggestion for the drive into Arches. We started our tour of the grounds looking at the giant redwood stumps that had been fossilized due to a massive volcanic event from a group of mountains nearby (34 million years ago if I remember right) called the Guffy volcanic center. A lahar, or mudflow, buried the entire valley including the first 15 feet of the giant redwoods that used to grow in this area up to 250 feet tall. A second lahar stopped a river that flowed through the valley as well creating a massive lake. The continued ash fall of the volcanic complex buried fish, insects, and leaves under the water perfectly preserving them as well as the whole area cooled and dried. This is one of the largest fossil beds in the world. Most of it’s best specimens are housed in Harvard University. Unfortunately, since it didn’t become a protected park until 1969, many of the petrified stumps are damaged from the abuse of people stealing bits of the fossils and taking shale containing fossils from their resting places. We didn’t get to see a dig site this morning, but we did take the mile walk around the preserved massive redwood stumps. The girls managed to earn their badges in about an hour and a half. They had a choice between a patch or a badge, or for a $1 donation to the park, they could get both. That was an easy choice. I got a sticker for the box for a $1 donation as well. There was a homestead exhibit in the park as well, but since it was already 10am with a long way to go, we opted not to do it.
Jada and I discussed the option of taking the road less traveled versus the direct drive to Grand Junction. We consulted the GPS to look at distances and arrival times. In the end, I heeded the advice on the Life is Good T-shirt Jada gave me for my birthday, “The journey is the destination.” And off we set for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. We drove over several passes, and near several more of Colorado’s 14-ers. It’s really something else to see the wall of peaks at the end of a valley floor that sits above 8,000 feet itself. We arrived at the canyon after going over the Continental Divide at Monarch Pass. It was a tough one to get over at 11000+ feet elevation. There was a ski station there, and we could have taken a gondola up Monarch peak, but we didn’t know about it, and I was on the way down the other side before we realized what it was. The valleys and canyons we drove through were incredible. We came into the Curecanti National Recreation Area which reminded us a lot of the Columbia River Gorge without the wind. We wound up and down the canyon walls, and finally we reached the national park at 2:30pm which only covers 14 miles out of the 53 total miles of the canyon.
To get there, we had to turn off highway 50 to a narrow road that climbed I don’t know how far. The poor Subaru was having trouble maintaining 40 mph speed limit at times, so the pitch had to have been pushing 10%. The fee for us to get in was $15 for the bunch. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is a rare combination of deep, narrow, and long that makes this canyon what it is. It was carved out of very old and hard crystalline rock left behind after the volcanic event known as the Gunnison Uplift. This hard rock plus the swiftness of the Gunnison river through it are the reason it is so deep and narrow. At it’s narrowest, it is only 40 feet wide. As the video we saw stated, water always wins in the erosion battle against stone. It has carved it’s deepest point of 2200 feet over a span of 2 millions years. The dark stone is made up of minerals called pegmatite (which has some glittery minerals in it), something called nice, and shist. I can’t guarantee that I’m spelling those correctly. I picked it up while listening to a ranger talk while the girls started on their second Junior Ranger badge of the day. We went on to 3 different view points. The first was right outside the visitor center which went out on a platform over the canyon on one of the walls. It was a sheer drop on both sides. Even with the railing, I wasn’t feeling very comfortable out there. We also stopped off at the Cross Fissures view. I didn’t see what fissures that refers to. It could be because I didn’t want to get too close to the edge. There also weren’t helpful signs pointing things out that you normally see at national park overlooks. The last stop we made was at Painted Wall View. That one was obvious, but they still had a sign there explaining that this sheer cliff wall was double the height of the empire state building. The “painting” is the result of molten lava intruded into the cracks of the existing rocks a billion years ago. Following our tour of the overlooks, we saw 2 birds of prey soaring over head. Jada thinks they may have been bald eagles, but I’m not sure those are in this area. I didn’t get a good look at them since I was driving. The girls were ready to receive their second badges of the day by the time they got back to the visitor center. Ranger Beatrice swore them in. Jada picked up a couple post cards, but they had no stickers there.
By that time, it was 5pm. We still had about 1.5 hours to get to Grand Junction. We had planned on grabbing dinner in Montrose which was 8 miles away, but the Garmin directed us away from any of the eating establishments. The girls were engrossed in their books, so we pushed on. When we got to the next city of Delta, we chose a Dairy Queen along the road we were on. Oddly enough, their menu for dinner consisted entirely of chicken or fish options. No burgers. Ellen and Jada each got a fish sandwich. Phoebe went for the hotdog (without mustard for some reason), and I got the chicken sandwich. The change in scenery from mountainous to littered with mesa’s and canyons is a big contrast. At least Highway 50 from Montrose to Grand Junction is 4 lanes all the way instead of the 2 lane highways we had endured all along.
We arrived at the Hampton in old town Grand Junction just before 7pm. It’s a neat little downtown district, and there’s a small grocery store across the street. We got the girls into bed by 7:30pm. Ellen fell asleep pretty quickly again. Phoebe is a different story. I think she’s just over tired from the trip and never even attempting to sleep in the morning if she wakes up early. Tomorrow the plan is to head up to the Colorado National Monument. It was 97 degrees when we got here today, but hopefully, if we get out early enough, we can beat the heat. I found several short hikes of less than 2 miles that we can do.
By the way, if you’re interested in any of the National Parks I’ve talked about, you can go to http://www.NPS.gov and search by state or the specific park name. There are typically maps on the web sites in pdf format.
July 26: Grand Junction, CO and Colorado National Monument (39 miles)
Phoebe didn’t sleep at all, and as a consequence, neither did Jada nor I. Luckily I’m able to handle it better than she, but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant. Combination of not able to fall asleep in general aided by sneezing and sniffing. Jada and I were grumpy to start the day again. (Also, please excuse me if I seem a little more scatological and long winded than normal.) We went down for breakfast around 6:15am. We seemed to be the first ones down there. The menu included bland scrambled eggs again, but this time, there was also smoked sausage and french toast sticks. Jada joined us close to 7am. We are almost out of our lunch provisions, so we took some bread and peanut butter from the breakfast area downstairs to make lunches for the day in case we were out still over lunch. We were on our way to the Colorado National Monument by 7:40am, and we arrived by 8:10am.
We drove all the way to the west entrance because it’s closer to the visitors center. It only cost us $7 to get in for the whole car. The Colorado National Monument is a mesa that has carved sandstone features of red, black, brown, and tan that makes the area beautiful. Every turn of the twisting ascent gives you a view into another canyon just as different as it is similar to the last. Balanced Rock is on this drive up, but it’s certainly not the only one in the park. There are views across the Grand Valley of Grand Junction and Fruita to the Grand Mesa to the east, Book Cliffs mesa to the north (called that because of the vertical walls resembling a book shelf from a distance), and the Fruita canyon to the northwest. The first thing I asked when we arrived at the visitor center (after getting the girls their Junior Ranger booklets, that is) was what was the difference between a National Monument and a National Park (I already knew that a National Treasure had to contain at least 1 Nicolas Cage). A National Monument can be created by a President whereas to become a National Park, it takes an act of Congress. The second question I asked was if they had any stickers. They didn’t. BUT, she did have a Colorado National Monument Association Member sticker she gave me for free. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice. If you’d like to see this mesa featured in a movie, rent “American Flyers”. It’s one of the stages in the movie’s Hell of the West, and was also a stage in the real (and now real defunct) Coors Classic Bicycle Race.
The girls got right to work on their Junior Ranger booklets in the exhibits room. It was still early, and a Monday, so we had the run of the place. People did start trickling in, but it wasn’t on the level of the parks we visited yesterday. I had already scoped some hikes for us to take last night from the web site (http://www.nps.gov/colm) from their list of short hikes. It worked out perfectly because the Junior Ranger booklet required a hike. We started with the Canyon Rim Trail which starts right out of the back of the visitor center on the rim of the Wedding Canyon, as it’s called. It’s called that because John Otto, the man responsible for preserving this area and getting it to be designated a National Monument, got married in that canyon. Even though the hike was right along the rim of the canyon with a few hundred foot drop, I was fine here. I guess it’s just the difference between a few hundred and a couple thousand. Sure, both can kill you, but it just seems like my odds are better. The hike was a mile round trip. We saw a couple lizards thanks to Ellen’s keen eyes along with some black widow spider webs. It was probably almost 80 degrees by the time we were hiking, but it wasn’t too bad with the breeze that was blowing through. From this hike we were able to see the sandstone formations called the Saddlehorn, Pipe Organ, the Island, and Independence monument. We found a natural stone bench for the girls to sit down on to make their observations for the hike.
After completing that hike, the girls were ready for their Junior Ranger badges. I think it was a record time even with the hike which took us about 30 minutes. We sat in the cool of the visitor center and had a snack until one of the rangers was available to quiz the girls and swear them in. Apparently, Ellen was one of the few Junior Ranger candidates who successfully answered the question about the difference between erosion and weathering (weathering is the act of breaking something down whereas erosion is the act of moving it away) all summer. That made Ellen a little extra proud. They got their usual badges, but also a patch for the Junior Ranger Program in general and a 15% coupon for any item in the store. They each chose a book.
The second hike we went on was just across the Rim Drive from the visitor center called the Alcove Nature Trail. This one had a guide book that talked about different features in the Monument. It was really interesting, and I did video of the whole walk while Jada read each of the items. There were 31 stops in all (I was going to make a comment about how Lebron James had petitioned the Park to retire the 23rd item in honor of Michael Jordan’s number, but I didn’t think anyone would get it) culminating in the end of a canyon that had been scooped out from wind and water and sand over millennia. It was way cool. If anyone reading this goes there, do this one first, and take along the guide book. It’s only $.50 to keep it, or as the lady in the visitor center suggested, borrow one for the hike and put it back. You’ll learn tons about the flora and fauna as well as the creation of these great cliffs. For instance (in my Cliff Claven voice), it’s a little known fact, that there is living dirt in the park called Biotic Crust that helps to prevent erosion of the fine sand and provides nutrients that allow plants to grow in the park. If you step on it (by going off trail), you will kill it, and it takes several lifetimes for the soil to revive itself. The trail follows the remnant of an ancient sand dune for millions of years ago frozen in time. I wish I was better at words to describe it. The colors are mostly the result of different levels of iron oxide in the soil causing the shades of red. The lighter browns are the ancient sand dunes. And all these different types of sedimentary rock are stacked upon one another through the ages and the act of erosion sweeps away the weaker materials to expose the new forms.
After that hike, we came back to the visitor center to eat our lunch and take in a ranger talk on snakes, black widows, and scorpions which are all residents of the canyon, but they’re pretty harmless to humans as long as you give them space. The most common snake in the park is a rattle snake which is nocturnal as is the giant hairy desert scorpion. Yes, it is, indeed, hairy. The ranger had pictures of a face off between a scorpion and a black widow spider that had occurred in the visitor center last year. Both survived. When the talk ended, we went to a drinking fountain behind the building to fill up our camelbacks for the next hike when we saw a snake slithering along the ground. It wasn’t one of the poisonous ones we had just been talking about though. The girls were excited to see it all the same.
We took in the beauty of the overlooks along rim drive. At one of them, we hiked right out onto one of the plateau tops. We also met a group of cyclists doing the Rim Drive road. I was envious since I remembered how much fun it was when I did it 15 years ago on my solo vacation to Colorado. They had all just come in from Quebec. I kidded them that they cheated by starting at the visitor center instead of from down at the entrance on the valley floor. We passed them a couple of times as we’d stop to look over the edge and get back in the car, and then they were lost on a climb. Eventually, we did reach what we thought was our final hike of the day.
I had targeted a hike called Devil’s Kitchen which was listed as one of the short hikes at about 0.8 miles out. It is a rock formation that looked neat in the pictures, and required some scrambling over slick rock (a misnomer since it is actually quite grabby and provides great traction) which Ellen loves to do. We started at the picnic area which had a wide, paved path heading away from it. We assumed this was the way to get there. Then the paved path turned to gravel, but it was still wide. Then it became a single track path, but still mostly easy to follow. Finally, it started getting really hard to follow over the rocks. So I looked at the map and saw that there was no way this was the hike since it started across the road from the entrance to the picnic area. Luckily, according to my GPS, we had only gone .25 miles (by the way, we also had great reception throughout the park. It’s the only park where we’ve gotten any service at all, let alone 3G). So we backtracked and went over to the actual start. This time, there were markings and signs letting us know we were going the right way until we started scrambling up the slick rock towards the feature (for lack of a better word). We moved to the right instead of to the left so we got off the intended route to the top. We still found our way in, though, and it was incredible. It was like a small hall carved out of the stone hundreds of feet in the air (the GPS says we climbed 708 feet, but that seems unlikely now that I think about it. That might be total gain, but still, it was probably 200 feet off the canyon floor). Because it was in the mid afternoon, we had nice shade from one of the walls so it was cooler to sit in(not something that should be called the “Devil’s kitchen.”) Plus the breeze was still able to make it in. There was another balancing rock formation out the open end of the landform. There was one rock that looked kind of like a monkey’s face that Phoebe wanted her picture in front of. Ellen just wanted to climb out of the small opening we had originally found on the outside before looking for the easy way in. We didn’t let her since it was quite difficult to get down from the other side that way. After resting and eating a small snack, we found the path we were supposed to come up to go down. It was much easier. Still, it was fun going up. It was like a puzzle looking for the natural steps that the rock makes.
In all, we were at the park from 8:10am to 3pm. We hiked 4 miles in desert heat. It was a fun and hard day. The girls hit the pool when we got back to the hotel for about 45 minutes while Jada and I took turns taking showers while the other watched the girls. We walked down main street for dinner. The first choice of an Italian place in the next block was foiled when we found it to be closed on Mondays. As we sat on a bench, the smell of Pablo’s Pizza across the street caught our nostrils. We went in there and found an odd children’s menu. They had figured out the 2 things that kids always want and put them on pizza: Peanut Butter and Jelly Pizza and Mac’n’Cheese pizza. Those of you who know our precious Phoebe can only imagine her glee at finding this out. She ended up choosing the PB&J on a pizza. It was as it sounds. Thin pizza crust with cheese, peanut butter, and I believe, grape jelly. It came in a 6 inch size, but she could only eat 3 of the 4 pieces. She loved it. Ellen had an adult sized calzone, but she could only eat half of it (it was pretty darn big). Jada and I split a 12 inch Blues Quintet which featured pepperoni, sausage, basil pesto, blue cheese, plus both red and green onions. It was tasty. For dessert, we got a slice of some sort of chocolate dessert to go. However, when they were getting it ready, they accidentally cut 2 slices out, so they just gave us both. So, if you ever find yourself in Grand Junction, CO, please, visit Pablo’s Pizza in the 300 block of Main street. You’ll be glad you did. (If you’re on Facebook, they apparently have specials posted there as well. We aren’t, so we didn’t get any deals.)
To put a capper on the night, we got back to the hotel room, opened the door, and were accosted by the sickly smell of cigarette smoke. It was so strong you’d have thought someone had been smoking in our room while we were out. I called the front desk immediately to request a room change. They fortunately had a room available down the hall across from the elevators (this had been the first room we’d had all trip that wasn’t right across from the elevators originally, by the way...so the trip had to correct itself, I guess). I had talked to the manager when he came up with the new keys. I thought maybe it had been blown in from the parking lot below our window (we’re on the 3rd floor), but he thought it more likely to be from downstairs. It will cost someone and extra $150 if they’re caught, because, you know, cigarette smoke is so easy to hide. This happened when we were hoping to get the kids to bed early. So we carried all of our things down the hall in record time. The girls were in bed by 6:45pm, and amazingly enough, I think they fell asleep well before 7:30pm. Even Phoebe tonight. Jada went next door to the coin operated laundry and found that the universal rule of people not being vigilant in keeping things moving when someone is waiting to be true. So she waits, even as I type this, for dryers to become available. Since we’re about to embark on about a week of camping before our next laundry availability, we wanted to get some things done tonight. Jada and I tag teamed on the laundry around 9:30pm so I went over to wait. It was 11pm before we got all the laundry done.
I was just downloading my pictures (and I think I added another 30 minutes to the slide show, minimum. Those who endured our previous slide show know what I mean), and I was struck by how little the pictures convey the colors and textures of the rock. I also noticed that I took a lot of pictures of Juniper and Pinyon Pine trees. I love the gnarled and wind swept shape and texture of the trunks. As well as rocks with different minerals infused into them in stripes.
The drive tomorrow to Arches is only 2 hours according to the GPS (though we’ve found that we still use physical maps quite a bit for reference). So, we’ll be able to roll out of here at a leisurely pace. Pick up groceries, re-stock the ice in the cooler, and do some poking around before settling into our camp site. We’re still hoping to get into the popular Firey Furnace ranger-led hike. It may also be a week before I get to send another one of these journals out, so you can all heave a huge sigh of relief.