I spent 4 days in Colorado over the last weekend putting even more miles on Angela’s car, Powder. Road-tripping with Angela is always a good thing. Our itinerary took us into South Central Colorado, to the town of Crested Butte and then onto Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The scenery was eye-poppingly beautiful all weekend.
On Friday, we stopped by Angela’s favorite hike about an hour and half south of Denver. The sun was shining brightly and we enjoyed our leisurely stroll through conifer and aspen groves eventually arriving at a creek (pronounced crick). Apparently there used to be beaver dam up the stream, but we couldn’t find any. Angela assumed they had been washed away. We then pressed on southwest along the 50 to the town of Gunnison. The weather was not looking so hospitable by this point, although the forecast said that the mountains would be “sunny” this weekend. We then turned north up the 135, deciding against staying in the Fossil Ridge Wilderness Area and settling on the Cement Creek Campground, 5 miles from Crested Butte. For $12/night, we were handed beautiful stream (pronounced crick)-front property. Eyeing the sky as the sun set, we decided to put on the rain fly “just in case”.
That night we dined at Donita’s Cantina in town. The place was full for good reason; we had a delicious dinner with cobbler and homemade ice cream for dessert. Mmmmm. After a fairly long day of hiking and driving, we had no problems drifting off to sleep that night.
It was a wee bit nippy in the morning and we headed into town for milk and cheese (see title) and some hot tea. We wandered up and down main street and took pictures of this very cool art piece made out of car fenders:
You couldn’t ask for a friendlier town. Even as the skies turned greyer we took the advice from a nice shopkeep to head up to the Copper Creek Trail to Judd Falls.
I thanked myself for packing gloves, a warm hat and a fleece jacket as a light rain fell. The flowers were out -lupine, larkspur, a variety of daisy and an occassional paintbrush. However, i can imagine the the “flower capital” of Colorado’s mountainsides are even more spectacular during the peak July season. The hike to Judd Falls was only a mile long and the falls were roaring. After a brief respite at the falls I realized that the rain falling had turned to snow. In fact it was snowing at a decent rate. Angela wanted to press on into the Maroon Bells Snowmass wilderness area to see Copper Lake, but I decided that with my knee giving me a little grief and the weather not exactly being pleasant we should head back to the car.
The sun came out briefly later in the afternoon, at which point I promptly lost my hat somewheres. Doh! We decided to stay another night at Cement Creek and spend the evening doing the appropriate activity for not-so-sunny weather -go see a movie and get pizza. We decided on Troy (as our only other choice was Shrek 2 which Angela had already seen). Wow. Hot men. Violent, but wow… hot men. Of course all my memory has been wiped of any greek history, so I consulted my brother to find out just had badly they had altered the story. Achilles was gay? Who knew? Brad Pitt would have still been hot hot hot, even if they had kept true to his relationship with his “fair cousin”.
Sunday morning we were greeted with an inch of snow. In fact, the snow was still falling as we packed up. We were now off to Black Canyon. The canyon is indeed darkly colored (consisting of schist and gneiss with veins of pegmatite) and narrow (supposedly shaped like a gun). Angela had been there in the wintertime when much of the park was closed off. She loves the canyon. In fact she very much wanted to hike to the bottom of the canyon. 1800 ft to the bottom + 1 mile of trail = one very steep hike. I decided to stay to the canyon uplands. 3-4 hours later Angela emerged none worse for wear. We headed on down the road to look at the various canyon overlooks. After a dinner of instant chicken soup, we rushed to Sunset Pt. to watch the sun cast it’s last remaining rays over the canyon. This may have been the prettiest spot to view the canyon at any time of the day.
My brilliant thought of the day was that National Parks should rent out guidebooks. I was curious about the pink flowers (phlox) that were copious throughout the park. So I scanned the 5-6 wildflower guide books at the visitor center til I found the flower I was looking for. Renting out books could solve two main problems. 1)There are too many wildflowers books to buy them all. Nor do I necessarily want the Colorado Wildflower book when I don’t even live in the state. 2)Region books (Southwestern wildflowers… right) tend to be too general. While out on the trail it would be nice to have a region specific book to help me identify the flowers I’m seeing. I think it would be a fun activity to do with kids too. Obviously this book rental idea would also do well with birding. I don’t think it would work too well with reptiles/mammals. I don’t think you spot them often enough to warrant a book rental. The parks could take a credit card down in case of book damage or theft. My guess is there are too many dishonest people in the world that such a great service will never be implemented. *sigh*
That night was cold! I actually missed the cloud cover provided the night before. We also had two drunken neighbors who were playing Rick James obnoxiously loud until 10 PM. I fretted I’d have to sick the camp host on them. Thankfully they took off (assuming to head down to Montrose to get more drunk??) Angela was out like a light.
The next morning we wished tha canyon adeiu and headed back along the gorgeous 92 to the 133. Angela must have waxed how idyllic everything was about 20 times. Hotchkiss was an especially quaint town. It was amusing to me how we’d come across a large beautiful reservoir and there would be maybe 3 boats on it. We seemed to be the only ones on the road. If you had anything as beautiful in or near San Diego it would have been swarming with people. We tempted to traverse a 4×4 road near the town of Marble that was a little too rugged for our likes and settled on lunching among the red rocks at RedStone.
We arrived back in Denver around 4 PM. We had planned on meeting Angela’s new beau Chris for dinner, but he unfortunately had taken a spill during his bike race that day. So Angela and I had our last meal before dropping me off at the airport. My flight was delayed 3 hours. Ack! But I managed to entertain myself before touching down in SD at midnight.
Shawna’s rating: Colorado totally, totally did not suck. 
Honeymoon We reserved our shore excursions for the cruise. Double woo-hoo! It turns out we won’t be stopping in Caracas, too much of a liability I guess.