Colorado Joy

Before leaving the eastern side of the Rockies, we spent three days in Fort Collins, visiting our longtime friend Marge Corcoran - she and Doug began working together in Virginia forty-two years ago, and she relocated to Colorado about fifteen years ago.

We found Fort Collins to be a delightful small city - lots of art, music, shops (closed or socially distanced, right now, unfortunately). It's popular with retirees, and is the kind of place we might consider in the future for ourselves.

Marge, who is now retired (like us) is a part-owner of an artists cooperative gallery, and gave us a tour after hours, including a sample of her glass work.

We attended an outdoor concert given by a friend of hers, with socially distant seating.

Colorado State University is located in Fort Collins, and has a large agriculture program. We visited their "trial garden," where they evaluate flower seeds from around the U.S. to see which grow best in Rocky Mountain conditions. It was definitely a treat for the eyes.

We also traveled up to the Horsetooth Reservoir in the foothills. It provides water to the local towns and to Fort Collins.

We hiked to the local Poudre River (very popular with tubers) and built a few rock cairns.

Another day we drove south to the town of Loveland and visited the Benson Sculpture Garden. Loveland has several foundries which produce bronze sculptures for artists around the world. Each year, new works are added to the sculpture garden.

Leaving Fort Collins, we drove south toward Denver and then west on I-70 to the Dillon Reservoir, a large lake which holds the water supply for the city of Denver. It's located at 9,000 feet elevation, about five miles away from the Breckenridge ski resort. We stayed there for three days, having lucked into a spacious site at the U.S. Forest Service's Heaton Bay campground.

We hiked to some great views of the reservoir.

We were also able to get our inflatable kayak out from its storage bay under the RV, and go for a couple of paddles in the reservoir and around its islands.

From Dillon, we moved on to Great Sand Dunes National Park (GSDNP) in the southern part of Colorado. It's one of our lesser known national parks, with only 450,000 visitors annually (by contrast Great Smoky Mountains National Park has 12,500,000 visitors).

Before we tell you about our time there, we'd like to pause for a shout out to our Interagency Lifetime Senior Pass.

You can buy one of these babies for $80 when you reach age 62, and it gives you free admission to all national parks and monuments for the rest of your life. That is a great deal when you consider that the fee to enter just one of the major parks is now $35 a pop. You also pay only half-price when you stay at a Park Service or Forest Service campground.

Although visiting U.S. national parks is not our only reason for traveling around in the Ciaowagen, it is certainly a key one. We're keeping track of our park visits in a couple of ways. First, we've got this display hanging on the bathroom door with postcard-sized vintage-style posters of national parks the Ciaowagen has visited (26 so far).

And if you look closely at some of the pictures we've posted, you've seen Jeannette's expanding collection of pins on her hat-of-many-national-parks.

Great Sand Dunes National Park (GSDNP) is unique, with the tallest sand dunes in America (some over 750 feet high) nestled at the foot of the Sangre di Cristo mountains. It's an amazing sight. We overheard someone remark that it is like going to the beach without the ocean!

If you look closely at the picture below, those black dots are people climbing on the dunes!

Sandboarding and sand sledding are very popular. We considered renting sleds, but decided to opt out after noticing that the ratio of unsuccessful sledding to successful sledding (successful shown in the video below) was quite large. Also, rentals were expensive and the lines to get them quite long.

As an alternative, we decided to try a hike up the dunes. While we felt hiking up to the highest ridge was probably beyond our endurance, we thought we might manage to make it up about 75% of the way. Our goal was to reach the rounded hill marked by the red arrow.

First, we started with a half-mile hike from the parking lot to the base of the dunes.

The combination of altitude (8,000 feet plus) and walking in sand (remember what it's like to climb even a small dune at the beach) made for a slow ascent.

With some perseverance (and a lot of huffing and puffing), we made it to our goal after about 90 minutes. We'd like to claim that, in the picture below, those were snow sleds that we'd carried to the top, but they actually belonged to some college students who took our picture for us.

We were up high enough to see beautiful views all around.

Thankfully, it was much easier coming back down...

As we headed back to the parking lot, we passed by the "bunny slope" for sandboarding - lots of families with young kids.

Here In the mountains, July and August is the monsoon season. Days start off sunny and bright, and then thunderstorms come in daily during the late afternoon and evening.

Monsoon Rains Arrive

Evening Clearing After the Storm

On our final day in the park, we hiked up to the Dunes Overlook. From there, you can see how massive the dune field is, backing up all the way to the mountains. Overall the dunes cover 30 square miles!

It was time to move on again, this time headed west to another little-visited treasure: Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. It only gets about 300,000 visitors annually.

Black Canyon is not the biggest canyon, or the narrowest, or the deepest, or the longest in the U.S. However, it is striking, with dark, almost vertical walls rising from the Gunnison River twice as high as the Empire State Building.

The canyon material was formed eight miles below the earth's surface 1.5 billion years ago, uplifted as a dome about 50 millions ago, covered with volcanic rocks and ash 30 million years ago, and then the Gunnison River started carving a canyon through the area about 2 million years ago. Two million years of freezing and thawing rocks with slightly different hardnesses have created a lovely crenelated look.

One particular striking feature is called the Painted Wall, where extrusions of pegmatite (which includes quartz, mica, granite, and other minerals) into the base rock long ago underground create patterns in the exposed wall.

There is a six-mile drive along the rim leading to a number of overlooks. The winters are severe in the park, and there are ancient gnarled evergreens along the rim.

Some of the other vegetation is just as old but not as large. The yellow lichen on this rock is among the first plant growth to occur after major geologic events.

We spotted a bit of wildlife in the park...

...including a mouse that snuck into the RV one night. Fortunately, we don't leave much loose food lying around.

One unique aspect of Black Canyon during COVID times is that they actually had some ranger-led walks . . .

.. as well as evening programs (all limited in number, socially distanced, and with mandatory mask-wearing.

These ranger programs are something we've missed in other parks we've visited since March. Visitor centers are closed, although in a few parks the rangers are available at tables outside for questions.

One day we drove down to the river level to see what the park looks like from another angle. The walls look pretty tall from that aspect too!

Black Canyon is a designated International Dark Sky Park, a distinction held by about 20 national parks. The air is dry and, at 8,000+ foot elevation, particularly clear.

One evening, we sat out under the night sky for over an hour taking it all in. Overhead and looking to the south we could see the Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and several meteor falls.

And to the northwest, we were treated to the sight of Comet Neowise.

We very much enjoyed our visit to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP.

After three days there, it was time to move on to our last two destinations in Colorado. More about that in our next blog entry!