Westacular

From about the time I was in preschool through third grade my family lived in Fort Collins, Colorado.  Since our route though Colorado towards Mount Rushmore went right through Ft Collins, I wanted to show the girls where I lived during these young years.

First we drove past the church where I went to preschool.  Then we went by my old elementary school.  The building looked so small!  The building looked exactly as I remembered it, except that what used to be seem large is now obviously designed for very small people.  We drove past the swimming pool I would play in during the summer, the SCCA, a place I had totally forgotten about.

We drove the route I used to walk to and from school and the distance was a lot shorter than I remember.  But the neighborhood didn’t seem to have changed at all.  I showed Jessie and Sarah Michael where my friend Kyle lived, and where the neighbor Lola lived.

Then we got to our old house at 205 Darmouth Trail. The house is just as I remember, though I’m sure the shutters are a different color, and the trees are now much larger.

Less than a block away from our old house was the park where I would play as a boy.  I showed SM the lake I used to fish in, the creek I used to pull crawdads from, I even remembered one of the trees that stood beside the creek.  I walked up the hill I used to sled down and took in the view, the park is so beautiful.  Sarah Michael played on the playground, and she and I went on the swings together.  It was a lot of fun.

We were so lucky to live in such a cute little neighborhood with a wonderful park practically across the street.

North of Moab we got onto eastbound I-70.  This is really one of the first times on the trip we’ve spent a lot of time on an actual interstate freeway.  The speed limit is 75, but we can’t go that fast.

I-70 is impressive, as it moves into the mountains the east and west-bound lanes are for long stretches elevated on bridges, allowing them to be wider than they could be if the road had been build on the actual ground.  It looks cool, too.  Well done highway designers.

We made our way along, and it was fun to see the landscape change.  The rocky cliffs remained for a while, but green trees started to appear and the hillsides grew greener and greener.

We got hungry and asked the Garmin which restaurants were nearby, and lucky for Sarah Michael her favorite kind of food was just few miles ahead.  Sato Sushi was the place in Edwards, CO.  The food was good and town is cute.  It should be, it is quite near Vail and affluence clearly infects this place too.  If I could afford it it seemed like a nice place to live.

As we climbed the mountain pass higher, it began to rain.  This was a nice change.  We haven’t seen proper rain for quite a while and I missed it!  Then we climbed even higher and the rain started to change to snow!  The highest we got was just over 11,000 feet, there was more mountain still ahead of us but thankfully we were spared more climbing, the long Eisenhower-Johnson tunnel allowed us to start going back down.  This was good, the RV was really laboring to pull itself and the jeep up the steep grade and we were not able to maintain any speed at all.  By the time we reached the entrance to the tunnel we were down to 25 miles an hour.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain near Denver, we saw a couple of great freeway signs.  They came and went too quickly for us to get pictures, but RockyMountainRoads has pictures here and here.

We finally arrived our destination, St. Vrain State Park, after 10pm, though we would have been there sooner had the Garmin actually known where the place was.  I had preloaded the GPS system with our destinations based on addresses or other info we got when booking our stays, and we were sent about three miles off course.  Not a great distance, but when you’re driving a vehicle with a 100-yard turning radius that can’t back up because of its towed vehicle it makes correcting navagational mistakes more of a challenge.

Good night!

This morning we left Moab for Colorado, but we stopped along the way at Arches National Park.

Arches is beautiful.  It is similar to Monument Valley, but different enough to make it worth the visit.  One difference is that since Arches is a National Park visitors have much more access to the rocks.  At Monument Valley we weren’t allowed to go off the beaten path, but at Arches we could park the car then walk up close and climb on the rocks.  Certainly this could be at someone’s peril, as there are plenty of dangerous places to go, but that’s part of the fun.

Arches is also inexpensive to visit, $10 for our carload.

Arches is also in Moab, which appears to be a paradise for anyone with desires for Jeeping, mountain biking or river rafting.  It is a beautiful area.

Oh, another difference betwen Arches National Park and Monument Valley is that while Monument Valley is viewed from a dusty dirt road, Arches is nicely paved.

There are, of course, arches.

We stopped at Double Arch and walked over to climb into it.

As we walked on the trail, Sarah Michael noticed that her voice echoed off the rock walls, this amused her.  So we make loud noises to hear them come back to us, I’m not sure the foreign tourists appreciated this.

Climbing on the rocks isn’t especially difficult, but you must pay attention.  It is steepish but there are plenty of bits to put your toes and fingers onto.  The last bit of the climb to get up into the smaller archway was the most difficult so I basically held Sarah Michael up as she found footholds to use.  It was fun, though, and made me wish for more time in Arches so we could explore and climb more.

Alas we didn’t visit very much of the park, it was already 11am and we knew we had a long drive ahead to get us to our next campground in Longmont, Colorado.

So off we went.  Southern Utah is really something, I look forward to returning to see more.

Here we are driving on I-70 through eastern Utah on the way to Colorado.  Jessie is at the wheel and she just saw a deer!  She’s been feeling left out and gets frustrated by the road signs warning of animal possibility.

So a big Hooray!  Jessie saw a deer!

Have you ever noticed that Utah license plates don’t say “Utah”, instead they say “Utah!”?  I’m starting to see why, there is some amazing stuff to see here and we haven’t even gone off the highway yet.

After going through Mexican Hat, UT which is named for a rock formation that looks sombrero-ish, the red rock whose dust we’ve been breathing for the last few hours is gone and the geology has been replaced by something entirely different.

Then you’ll go up a canyon and then down into another that looks different again.  The topology, geology, geography or whatever is constantly changing and is good fun to look at.  The rocks some in some pretty neat shapes too, and right next to the highway!

We passed a lot we wished we could have seen, Needles, Natural Bridges, Valley of the Gods.  Plus I see all kinds of roads with Jeeping potential.  We are definitely coming back.

We decided to bail on Four Corners, we’ll save that for a future visit when we can see southwest Colorado and a time when Sarah Michael finds all this stuff more interesting.

We were about to drop down a steep grade on the highway when we were stopped by the Highway Patrol.  They were closing north-bound traffic while they let south-bound traffic use our lane on the grade to get past a slow-moving wide load.  We only had to wait about ten minutes but we were sure curious what the fuss was about.  I don’t know what that truck was hauling, but it was enormous.

About 30 minutes south of Moab we drove up on Wilson Arch and stopped to have a closer look.  How can stuff this amazing be so accessible?

You can climb right up into the hole in the rock, which we did. It is so beautiful!

We finally arrived into Moab at 7:30 and got into our RV park.  This is a beauitful area, I’m sad we can’t spend more time here this trip, but knowing we’ll come back and we have so much to look forward to is quite a comfort.

The plan today was to drive to Four Corners, then go north to Moab, UT where we’re going to stay the night.  As we headed east we entered the town of Kayenta, AZ to gas up and from there saw this huge dark monolith in the distance.

We checked the map and saw that north of Kayenta was Monument Valley, a name that think I’ve heard before.  Monument Valley is actually several miles north, but the rocks we could see from Kayenta told us we needed to detour north and check out this action.

Monument Valley is amazing.  I loved it.  To visit costs a whopping $5 per adult (hear that Skywalk people?).  Then you can park and go to the Visitor Center (they’re in the middle of building a new one) or travel the 17-mile dirt road loop through the valley.  Oh yes, that’s what the Jeep is for.

Everywhere you look there are incredible rock formations.  A bummer is that you’re quite limited in where you can go, secondary roads that might lead from the main loop are forbidden, but that’s ok, the views from the main road are great.

Many of the formations have names.  There’s the Elephant, the Camel, Three Sisters, Totem Poles and lots more.  There are huge boulders that have fallen off the cliffs, and some of them sit atop much smaller rocks, making for fun and precarious photo opportunites.

I took a lot of pictures, way more than are necessary to make the point, but it is hard not to.  Everywhere you look you’re like, “Whoa!” and “Check that out!” and on and on.

Monument Valley is a must-do.  I recommend it highly.  It is cheap and you don’t actually need a 4×4 vehicle to make the loop.  Most people were driving their rental minivans and sedans and they all did fine.  We did see three rented RVs on the loop, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

Today we left Arizona, the Grand Canyon is now just a memory.

One thing that really struck me about the area surrounding the Grand Canyon was how green it was.  The area is hot but it must get a lot of precipitation because the hills and valleys are just covered with greenery.  There are some times when driving on the park roads where if I didn’t know I was at the Grand Canyon I could easily believe I was somewhere along the Oregon Coast.

The night we arrived into the park we did see lightning as we drove in, and yesterday we saw clouds dropping rain somewhere, but we never got wet ourselves.

We left early-ish, at 7:20 and started making our way towards a one-night stay in Moab, Utah on our way eventually to Mt. Rushmore.

Much of the drive once we left the National Park was through the Navajo Indian Reservation, and there were some interesting geological features that we didn’t think to photograph. There are these huge mounds, for example, that look like gravel piles, but there’s nothing to suggest they are actually piles of gravel moved from somewhere else. They stand in stark contrast to the pervasive red rock that is just about everywhere else.

Just before Tuba City, AZ we came across signs advertising Dinosaur Tracks. We couldn’t pass it by without stopping.

We were guided by a local Navajo girl who explained the tracks were made by Raptors, Allosaurus, Pteradactyls and a fourth one I can’t remember.

There were also fossilized bones, a claw and lots of dino droppings.

In addition to offering tours of the footprints there were also women selling locally-made jewelry and other trinkets.  The place had the kind of grim sadness of a lot of the roadside Indian merchants.  The stands are rickety and quite spare, you can sense the desperation of the people.  We gave the tourguide a “donation” and also bought some bracelets.

It was a worthwhile stop, very fun to see dinosaur artifacts out in the wild.

BAHHHHH…….The only wild animals I have seen since the Elk in Oregon are what we now joking refer to as “wild cows” free range and and I saw a dead jack rabbit on the side of the road and some REALLY big birds.

I plead with the people who put up the signs that say, watch for deer/Elk, watch for mt. goats or the signs that were all through Yosemite ” speeding kills bears”.  Today we saw a sign we had never seen before, cougar next ten miles.  Do we ever see any of these animals…NO….so please take these signs down.  The are only teasing us and making people like me sad that there are never any animals to see.  And who’s to say that they will be in those specified miles?  They might actually be roaming outside their boundaries.  They are after all wild animals.

We spent today driving around the Grand Canyon park and seeing the sights.  It is certainly an impressive sight!

This morning, before we left our RV spot we were relaxing outside when Sarah Michael saw a little groundhog-type animal poking his head out of a hole.  We watched as it pushed dirt up from his tunnel out onto a pile.  And he didn’t seem the least bit afraid of us.  We got closer and closer and he just went about his business.

Then we headed off to see the canyon.  We headed off to one of the historic sites in the park and on the way stopped at one of the many roadside view points.  I imagine it is hard to find a bad spot to view the canyon, as everywhere you go and the views are spectacular.

Sarah Michael thought the this rock formation looked like WALL•E in his crouched position…

Next we went to the Watchtower, built in 1932.  It is three stories high and has great views.

We stopped at a couple of other viewpoints and the view was always great.  But it didn’t take me long to get tired and want to get back to the RV.  The Grand Canyon is beautiful, but it all kinda looks the same after a while.

So we’re back in camp now, relaxing (this is what vacations are for!).  We leave tomorrow for a couple days of long driving so I’m going to luxuriate in nothingness for as long as I can!

Thanks to the movie Cars, even little Sarah Michael is familiar with Route 66.  If you remember the song, one of the stops along the highway was Kingman, Arizona.  Good thing our path to the Grand Canyon went through Kingman, it meant a photo opportunity.  Another good thing, it was dinner time which meant a visit to a roadside diner.

The place was 1950s through and through, and I had to smile at the family from England who walked in with wide eyes and wider smiles.  They sat in the booth beside us and they all took pictures of each other using their phones.

The food was great!  Jessie and I both had burgers, Sarah Michael enjoyed a hot dog and afterward a root beer float.

After a nice dinner we hit the road to continue to the Grand Canyon.  We still had many miles to go, but it was a good day and we were all happy.