No photos today unfortunately. We realized we forgot to bring our cable to our cameras, and you only have other photos courtesy of Nolte and Trevor's cable!
It’s been a few days since I’ve updated about the trip. Since last, we’ve been through Salt Lake City, Fort Collins, and are now leaving Mesa Verde National Park. We decided to detour from Black Canyon of the Gunnison for two reasons. First, we had run into some terrible terrible weather, and we just wanted to get as close to the desert and warm sunny weather as possible. Second, it actually cut part of our trip down by a few hours – so instead of a 12 hour drive tomorrow, we only have around 8 hours! Much better!
Nick updated you on a lot of SLC. Suffice to say the Mormons were super friendly (frighteningly so), and the mountains were amazing. We also ate some great food – including at the famed Blue Iguana (the less-crowded cousin of the famed Red Iguana), where Nick got to have some “real (i.e. Americanized but delicious) Mexican food.
We got on the road by 7:30 on Wednesday to make the marathon drive over the I-80 to Fort Collins. Now, let me just make this observation: it seems like some states were destined to be beautiful, and some states ended up just plain ugly. I thought it was an amusing fluke when the vistas suddenly got pretty again once we crossed from southern Idaho into Utah. I observed this phenomenon again along the I-80. The portion of the highway in Utah went through these cute little mountain towns, including Park City, where much of the 2002 Olympics were held. Then we crossed into Wyoming, and suddenly everything became a barren wasteland. We were actually “lucky”, because there was a fair bit of snow on the plains, and it made it look a little more dramatic. Without that, I imagine everything would have been pretty dull and brown. Then, 7 hours later, we crossed into Colorado and were met with beautiful mountains and fir trees and rocks! So lesson learned – Wyoming is just ugly!
Fort Collins was a great town as well. We stayed there with my old high school friend Amanda and her fiancé Chris, who live in a small 100-year-old house in Greeley (half an hour outside of Fort Collins). They have a dog and two cats (and 3 horses!) who entertained us immensely. Aspen, the Cattle Dog-Border Collie cross, was hilarious, and would wrestle with both cats. She was very pleased to have Nick and I to scratch her, and we were happy to do so, since we’ve been going through some puppy withdrawl!
Amanda and Chris are beer connoisseurs and took us to a few local breweries for samples. We went to New Belgium, Odell, Equinox, and CooperSmith's (the only place to eat). We tried samplers at the first three, but were a bit too drunk for samplers by the last one (damned elevation!). I ended up with two favourite beers. The first was from New Belgium called Eric’s Ale, which was an in-house specialty that was aged three years in casks with peaches! It was light and sweet and so delicious. The good parts of a cider with the good parts of a beer. My second favourite was Coopershead’s Chili Beer, a beer made to taste like chili peppers. It would have tasted fantastic with nachos, and in fact was just fantastic and fascinating on its own. Unfortunately, the end result in my tummy was the fire one usually feels in their mouth when eating chilis! But it was fantastic beer all around, and I didn’t have one beer that I wouldn’t drink again!
The morning of the 13th, after a great breakfast at one of the local coffee shops (Loodles), we headed on the road toward Denver for our Casa Bonita detour. Unfortunately, when we got there, neither of us was really hungry, and we couldn’t see all the cliff divers and Black Barts Cave without eating. PLUS, apparently no one at Casa Bonita ever takes any food home because they didn’t have take-home boxes! But the novelty was in seeing the place, so we grabbed a picture and hopped back on the road. We drove southwest on the 285, which was a fantastic drive, albeit a bit scary! It takes you through all of the mountain towns, several of which were clearly used as the basis for the town of South Park. Unfortunately, these mountain towns came with some real mountain weather, and our elevation peaked at near 3100 meters! There was still about 4 feet of snow on the side of the road, and some near-white-out conditions. Not exactly what we planned on, but we never had any real scares since the roads were recently plowed and our truck has 4X4!
We arrived Thursday night around 8:30 at Mesa Verde, which is absolutely gorgeous driving in. We spent Friday on a long hike to see the north face of Prater’s Ridge. We spent about 2.5 hours hiking around and then went to scope out some climbing. We saw lots of animal tracks - we guessed we saw mountain lion, fox, and deer tracks. We figured as long as we were seeing tracks of mountain lions and not actual mountain lions, all was good. Plus we got some photos of a bunch of lizards. After the hike we took a short nap, and hiked in about a mile to see the sunset between Prater Ridge and Knife Ridge. Today it’s off to the Grand Canyon and Zion for some real climbing!
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