The magical day finally arrived. Travel day! Since the bride and I planned an early departure (In the bride’s logic this means before 10 am, VERY early is before 9 am, God-Awful early is before 8 am and we don‘t even talk about time before 8 am.) I told The Emmer I would drive her to work at 6 am.
This morning when we got to the car, The Emmer said the weather report was calling for snow in the mountains! Snow today and tomorrow and then it will turn hot. Great, I get to pull Bivouac through the snow and when I get there I’ll get roasted! I’ll take the roasted part, just don’t want to pull Bivouac thru snow if I don’t have to.
It seemed like the key was to make it through Vail Pass on I-70 as quick as we could, before the roads had a chance to get bad. As it turned out is wasn’t too bad. We actually left by about 8:30 am and didn’t hit snow until Eisenhower Tunnel. From there to just past Vail it snowed off and on but the temperature stayed right around freezing so the residual warmth of the ground kept the roads from freezing.
Once we were beyond the danger area we stopped in the Target store in Glenwood Springs to get all the things we remembered we left at home and to get a Starbucks. Yes sir. We believe in primitive camping and getting back to nature on these trips! We also gassed up there…ouch. This is beginning to hurt. $67 for a tank of gas….as in ONE tank…as in $3.56/gallon….as in cry when you remember pooling pennies with the guys to buy gas at $0.25 a gallon…as in 25 cents.
Glenwood Springs was in the midst of a huge forest fire two years ago. You can see on the hillsides around the town just how close the fire got. The stark contrast of the burned trees, the red rock and the new green spring growth is pretty dramatic. In this other picture you can see the snow line from today’s weather that was at about 10,000 feet.
We arrived at Day One destination, Rifle Falls State Park, by about 1 pm. The reason I chose this spot for the first night is that I had never been here before and it is consistently listed as one of the most scenic spots in Colorado. It is a beautiful spot and being a Tuesday the park was not over-run with campers. Here are some pictures of the falls.
Dinner this night consisted of home made spinach manicotti. As I said, we prefer roughing it. No frozen manicotti for us… We also enjoyed watching the hummingbirds at the feeder right outside of the window. We saw two different species. The Broad Tailed Hummingbird and the Black Chinned Hummingbird both semi-coexisting at the same feeder.
Tomorrow we plan to go north and west through Rangley, Colorado and stop at Dinosaur National Park, on the Utah side. For those who have been reading this blog for a while…the trailer jack works just fine. It went up at the appropriate time.
Thanks for visiting.
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