Grand Junction

Travel Day - Fruita, CO

On Saturday I made the two hour, 110 mile drive from Carbondale to Fruita, Colorado, which is just outside Grand Junction. I’ve been really impressed with how beautiful western Colorado is, even just from I-70, with mountains visible regularly but also going through many canyons too. The campground is another state park, much smaller than the one I stayed at in Denver, but still very nice and has good campsites too. I can look out either side of my trailer and see mountains, plus it has a tree that shades my trailer, and some shade for the picnic table too:

Colorado National Monument

Sunday was primarily an errand and planning day, nothing too exciting. Monday I went to Colorado National Monument. The name is misleading, it is closer to a national park than a single monument, with lots of canyons and rock formations.

It was a pretty two or so hour drive to get all the way through the park stopping at all the pull-offs. One of the pull-offs was at a bend in a canyon that had a good echo, and I was lucky enough to have it to myself for quite a while. Maybe I’m too easily amused, but it was a lot of fun to play with my echo.

I also did a couple of the short hikes in the park, although this is probably the first place where I don’t think the hikes really improved the view. One of the hikes had some rock scrambling, which is the first time I’ve done that, and I didn’t love it. I’m glad I skipped some previous trails where it was required but much further in than the trail I did here.

Overall, I really liked this park and would highly recommend spending a half day there, and it is close to the interstate if you happen to just be driving by.

Dinosaur National Monument

On Tuesday I drove about two hours north to Dinosaur National Monument. This is another misnamed park in my opinion, while there is a quarry with many dinosaur bones that could classify as a monument, there was a whole other part of this park that had a 30 mile road with many views of canyons and mountains too.

At the end of the road in the canyon area was a short 2.5 mile hike that had both of these great views off of it.

The area of this park with the dinosaur bone fossils is about 30 minutes away from the canyon area. After parking at the visitor center, the quarry with the fossils is still about 1/4 mile by car or about a mile by hike. They recommend taking the shuttle up, and then hiking back, as there are some more fossils you are supposed to be able to see along the hike back, and it is an easier downhill hike, so that’s what I did. Seeing the quarry is quite impressive, there are over 1500 bones visible in a relatively small section of rock. The bones all settled to the bottom of a river, and were eventually buried and lithified into solid rock. They were later then popped up to the angle they are at now as the mountains in the area were being formed.

The hike back was somewhat disappointing, the other fossils were not particularly well marked, so they were difficult to find.

Devil’s Canyon

Wednesday was a relaxation day for me, I didn’t do much outside of reading a book and a little more planning for the next couple of days. Thursday morning I went to Devil’s Canyon, it was recommended to me by a local I met while hiking in Colorado National Monument. There were a bunch of different trails through this park, I ended up on two of them that took me on about a five mile loop, but I could have probably done 10 times that with all the trails available.

I’m still adjusting to hiking in desert conditions, not having trees for shade or the cooler weather up north definitely changes things. I have to start earlier in the day so the temperature doesn’t get too high, and I’m finding that it’s still better to keep hikes shorter, as the 2.5L water bladder I have in my pack seems to only be good for five or six miles depending on elevation changes in the heat.

Ouray and Telluride

On Friday morning I got up early and drove the two hours south to Ouray. It is a tiny town, but nestled nicely in the mountains. It has a six mile hiking trail around the town, so my original plan was to hike that, as it was another recommendation of the lady I met in the Colorado National Monument. It was pretty apparent early in the hike though I wasn’t feeling it, especially after I scrambled up part of the trail using metal cables after apparently missing a turn: I went a little further and got a nice view of Ouray: A little past that was Cascade Falls: At that point I decided to cut the hike short and head back to my truck. About halfway back to my truck it started pouring rain, and I felt justified in my decision to cut the hike short, since it didn’t stop raining until late afternoon, and it was already slippery enough while dry.

I decided to head over to Telluride, which looks close on the map but unfortunately there aren’t any roads that make it easy to get there, so it took about an hour to drive over there. The drive in to Telluride was very pretty, the canyons were a very dark red rock. Driving in to town was also pretty, there is a waterfall visible from the main street running through town: Telluride was very busy, there were people everywhere even though it was raining. I spent at least 30 minutes driving around looking for a parking spot and couldn’t find one, including two parking garages that were “open” but didn’t have a single parking space available. On the way out of town I went by the Telluride airport, it looked pretty amazing from some of the videos I’ve seen, so I wanted to see it for myself. It didn’t disappoint, here is a drone video showing some of the views:

Gas Update

With gas prices coming down and Colorado selling 85 octane gas as their regular, I’ve been doing some experimenting with higher octanes, especially while towing, starting with the July 28th fill-up. It’s hard to put hard numbers to it because I haven’t used a full tank of gas while towing since switching, but it does seem to increase my MPG by at least 1-2, although that doesn’t justify the increased cost in most cases.

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