To the South Rim. . . and Beyond

Well, this is embarrassing. I had two days of blog posts for my Colorado trip. The first post went out at the scheduled time on Oct 17, and the second apparently stayed in the draft folder. I had scheduled it to go out on the 18th, but forgot to click the "Publish" button. I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging. In any case, I think I can actually launch this post and I'll take the time to see that it goes out this time.

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I was glad I'd made the effort to see the Black Canyon from the north rim. It's like the Grand Canyon, I suppose, in that of all the visitors to the canyon, only about 10% have seen it from the north rim. So, to the car and 15 miles back to Crawford, 8 and a half miles of which is graded dirt road. Then 42 miles of lovely scenery along CO-92 to the Blue Mesa Reservoir and another 30 miles on US-80 to the turn-off for the main entrance to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, 7 miles east of Montrose.

Pretty much as soon as you turn away from the canyon it seems to disappear. The black rock and Juniper crossing the frame above from right to left marks a spur of the canyon. The dirt road on the far side leads to the Island Peaks overlook and some of the pictures in yesterday's post.

Having checked out the canyon and the river, staring down from a couple of the north rim overlooks, I looked up to study the sky for a moment. I was surprised by the wavy clouds filling the space between the standard issue puffy cumulus. I'd never seen that before and made me think of a Vincent Van Gough painting. Yeah, Van Gough would have loved this sky.

These next three three shots were all taken from the side of the road along CO-92 as I made my way down off the plateau to the Blue Mesa Dam on the Gunnison River. If I had the view above to look out on from my porch or a bay window, I think I'd probably spend much of the day scouring the hillside for elk or grizzlies.

There are those wavy clouds again. My first thought was that they must be the mountain waves I'd learned about when I started flying in the mid '70s, but I searched when I got home and found that these clouds are called billows, or billow clouds.

This is my Santa Fe, looking like a Hyundai ad in National Geographic or something. The highlights hide an awful lot of dust after my visit to the north rim - and a cracked windshield, which appeared magically several weeks ago with no star or anything to suggest a rock or gravel incident. Which tire was it? The right front. No leaks. The young man in Goldthwaite did a fine job with that tire repair.

Ah. We're at the south rim of the canyon now, looking north from the Chasm overlook. The National Park brochure says that the width of the canyon here, rim to rim, is 1100 ft.

I'm pretty sure this is the Sunset overlook view looking NW as the river heads off to join the Colorado at Grand Junction. I have other shots of this view from earlier visits, but I'd not been here near sunset before. The time of day (and the season) make all the difference.

This panorama is very similar to the first shot, above, but includes three frames left to right and shows how the canyon hides in plain sight if you're not paying close attention. I also didn't realize just how similar the shots were until a few minutes ago (or I would have pulled one or the other - probably the other).

Last one. I thought I had a good shot of the Painted Wall from the overlook a bit north of the Sunset overlook. This shot (from the north rim) is a panorama (and a better photograph) of the same features that the Painted Wall displays so well at particular times of the day (to other photographers, apparently). The darker gray colored rock (to the right of the grove of fir trees) is Gneiss, "a foliated metamorphic rock identified by its bands and lenses of varying composition, while other bands contain granular minerals with an interlocking texture. Other bands contain platy or elongate minerals with evidence of preferred orientation. It is this banded appearance and texture - rather than composition - that define a gneiss." (From Geology.Com) The white "paint" on these natural walls of graffiti are Pegmatite, "extreme igneous rocks that form during the final stage of a magma’s crystallization. They are extreme because they contain exceptionally large crystals and they sometimes contain minerals that are rarely found in other types of rocks." - "Some of the world’s best tourmaline, aquamarine, and topaz deposits have been found in pegmatite." (From Geology.Com)

The drive home on Thursday (day 3) was more than I could imagine. Fifteen hours the first day and almost fourteen hours the second day had taken its toll. I was beat! My motel reservation for the next night was in Plainview, TX but I cancelled that and rerouted myself from Durango through Santa Fe, NM, taking the most direct route and cutting out extraneous side trips. If I needed to stop, I could do so almost anywhere. When I left the motel in Montrose, the first surprise was that the temp was 30° and it was snowing. Undeterred, I headed south on US-550 through Ouray and Silverton to Durango - but it wasn't that simple. I had neglected to zoom in on Google Maps in the vicinity of Ouray or I would have realized that the town was in a box canyon at the foot of Red Mountain. To get to Silverton (and eventually Austin) I'd have to climb out of the box canyon via the 23 mile Million Dollar Highway, the defining features of which are narrow roads, no guard rails, no turn-arounds, and long drops - no reprieves. That would have been daunting, had I prepared for this trip properly. However, I still didn't know about the "hole" I was in. I started out of town and quickly realized I was climbing at a pretty good angle. The light snow was still falling but not sticking on the roads. . . still climbing and now I was noticing things about the road (narrow lanes), no guard rails, no place to turn around. . . yeah, kinda slow on the uptake. Now I know I'm in my own box canyon - there's only one way to go, and that's up (or down if I make another mistake). I remember passing the highway sign calling out 10,000 ft and wondering how much higher. The summit of US-550, Red Mountain Pass,  is 11,018 ft so I was there soon enough, but by that time snow had started sticking to the road which left me wondering how steep the descent would be. Worrying at this point wouldn't help a thing, so I just concentrated on sticking to the road. By the time I got to Silverton the snow had stopped, the roads were clear, and the run to Durango was unremarkable. Pagosa Springs, Santa Fe, Clovis, Lubbock, Brownwood (and Goldthwaite), Lampassas, and Austin in just over 19 hours. The adrenaline in my system from climbing out of Ouray lasted the whole day. I never felt the slightest bit sleepy. I got home at 1:15am Texas time, took some melatonin, and slept most of the day. If I'd known any of this ahead of time, I'd have rigged a dash-cam.

A Little Relief. . . from the Long Hot Summer

It's been SO HOT! I know, I know. That's what I get for living in Texas. Any number of things had me chompin' at the bit to get out of town for more than a couple of days. In the end, I was only gone for three, but it was an interesting three. Colorado was my destination. I needed the cool of more elevation, and I wanted to compare a Smoky Mountain Autumn and a Rocky Mountain one.

Day 1: An hour or so out of Austin I ran over a plastic bag in the dark that turned out to be a deer antler. The noise it made was epic, and I wondered for a while whether an antler could puncture a tire. It didn't take long to show me it can, and did. I managed to make it to the next medium-sized town and dawdled over a convenience store breakfast while the town woke up and readied itself for business. When it was ready, I had the tire repaired and it has held up admirably all the way through my Rocky Mountain adventure and return home. I spent the night in Colorado Springs after 15 hours on the road rather than the planned 13. I was so pleased the tire repair held up, 15 hours was fine.

Day 2: I timed my departure to put Colorado Springs behind me before sunrise and it worked out well. I was out in the sticks, headed NW to get an impression of Breckenridge, about 80 miles from said Springs as the crow flies. These first two pictures were taken about 2/3 of the way there.  As expected of a resort town, it's pretty - but way too crowded by my lights. I joined I-70 W to save travel time. My plan was to visit both the north and south rims of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. I normally eschew the Interstates if I can, but this whirlwind visit to the Rockies required the concession to expedience.

I would be remiss, however, if I failed to comment on the big surprise of day 2. The reason I try to avoid the Interstates is that they're typically much less interesting than US highways, and state & county roads. But the section of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon beats anything I'd ever seen with respect to roadways. The canyon is so narrow that the designer/builders used much of its floor space for the two eastbound lanes, alongside the Colorado River and cantilevered the westbound lanes from the north face of the canyon walls. Imagine the canyon having been terraced, with the east and westbound lanes on different levels running in opposite directions. And, I found out this evening that there's also a bike lane below the eastbound lanes and between them and the river. It's a gorgeous canyon and a magnificent civil engineering effort to accommodate the Interstate Highway System.

Able to leave the Interstate at Glenwood Springs I headed for the north rim of the Black Canyon, about 85 miles. Believe me, I had no problem wandering south on the state highway. It was exactly what I wanted to see. I missed the vivid reds and oranges of the Smoky Mountain autumn, but Colorado does an especially fine job with its Rocky Mountain golds. The Aspens and Douglas Firs are marvelous.

Finally, the north rim of the Black Canyon! There are several overlooks here and, while they might be a bit less elaborate than the typical overlooks you might find on the south rim or at Bryce Canyon for example, the views directly down to the river make it well worth the extra effort it took to get here.

This is the same view as above, taking advantage of the Canon's zoom lens. What do you think?

This is the view looking upstream at the Gunnison River so I don't know how deep the canyon is there. The only reference I could find about the canyon depth was 2250 ft deep at the Painted Wall, a mile and a quarter downstream. If I read the Google topographical map correctly, I got about 1520 ft deep at the Balanced Rock View (the two previous pics looking straight down). The topos also note that the north rim is about 80 ft lower than the south rim.

I found these two shots particularly interesting for the small footprint the Douglas Firs managed to establish on the canted shelf in the picture above, and the lone Aspen clinging to its even smaller sunny spot in the picture below.

This shot is looking upstream again and to me it emphasizes just how rugged this area actually is. In the distance, the canyon is a fair bit wider and a lot more fir trees share the extra sunlight. It also shows the precarious existence of the trees here with so little soil available to nurture them.

I hope to have another post ready to go tomorrow with shots taken on the drive to the south rim of the canyon and shots from the south rim overlooks.