High Country Road Trip

CarGuy and I left early Friday morning on a road trip into the high Colorado Rocky Mountains. We seem to do this every year or so. This time we decided to explore some areas of Colorado that neither of us had seen before. One of our main goals was to avoid the zoo that is Denver City during the Democratic National Convention. We did have to go through the west side of Denver to get to Hiway 285 but that was the only time we were there.

When we got to Gunnison and checked into the motel this is what was on the bed! A quilt, made in China I bet, but still a quilt. But it was a good omen, I think, for our whole mini vacation.

We took in a great Car Show, put on by the Gunnison Car Club, that totally surprised both of us. It was quite large with a total of 350 cars. I forgot to put on my sun screen and got fried by the sun on my shoulders and chest. Ugh. Thank goodness for aloe gel. I stayed out of the sun that afternoon by partaking of a quilt show. There will be more on that in my next post.

It was a fun trip because we saw parts of our state that we had never seen before. We saw the Blue Mesa Reservoir which is the largest reservoir in Colorado at 20 miles long with 96 miles of shore line. Then we took a bit of a side trip to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. O my! It was totally awesome! This next photo was taken from one of the observation decks. You can see a bit of the railing in the lower left corner. That big rock on the right side of the photo is about 100 feet away and in the center toward the bottom you can see the rushing Gunnison river. CarGuy and I spent two hours going from observation deck to observation deck and leaning over the railings to look and gawk. The rock formations and striations and colors are just indescribable.

During this trip we drove on three different Scenic Byways, some of which were dirt and gravel roads, 6 different mountain passes in this order

• Kenosha Pass (elevation 10,000 feet)
• Red Hill Pass (9993 feet)
• Cottonwood Pass (12,126 feet)
• McClure Pass (8755 feet)
• Muddy Pass (8772 feet)
• Cameron Pass (10,276 feet)

and we saw coyote, marmot, beaver, chipmunks, deer and eagles. We did not encounter a lot of wildlife because we were out in the daylight hours. If you care to see our route you can go to this Google map I generated.

I'll leave you with a photo of a geological formation called "The Castles" in the Gunnison National Forest, northwest of Gunnison.