Craters of the Moon NM, Pocatello, Bear Lake, Montpelier, Flaming Gorge, Dinosaur National Monument, Rocky Mountain National Park, Boulder

(posted from Kansas Turnpike McDonalds Travel Center, Lawrence, KS)
(This post covers 2-8 September)
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Monday, 8 September-

Today was a travel day. We had said a fond goodbye to Shilla last night since she had to work today but Moth was still around and wished us good travels. What a great weekend we had.
We departed Boulder about 0930 and soon were heading east on I-70. The GPS said we were 1497 road-miles from home.
We drove across the flats of eastern Colorado, watching the landscape change from western-looking sagebrush to sagebrush-and-grass, to farm fields of corn, sorghum, and hay.
A few hours later we crossed into Kansas and started also seeing pumpjacks here and there, bobbing their heads. I loved the ‘long’ views. Apparently I-70 rides a ridge and you can often see miles and miles off into the distance.
By 1930 we were tired of the road and found a Sam’s Club at Salina, Kansas for our overnight stay.

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Sunday, 7 September-

This morning we read the papers and shot the bull until lunch time. Then we got out the bikes and went for a bike ride through a few miles of the extensive bike trails in Boulder. Our little foldup bikes did very well.
After descending the creekside trail, we biked across to Shilla’s workplace where we put furniture back in place to prepare it for Monday after the weekend’s carpet cleaning. Then we rode to the Glacier Shop for ice-cream and a session watching the many college kids frequenting the area from the bench outside the ice cream shop. Hippie clothing is back in for the girls and many of the guys are wearing the worn-sideways-with-turned-up-brim baseball hats and carrying skateboards. I’m not sure why but we didn’t see the much more stylish army-surplus jackets and torn jeans of our college days.
We spent a few hours in the afternoon with the map of Alaska and its approaches, telling of our adventures up north.
That evening we walked into Boulder and had a leisurely dinner at The Med, a Mediterranean restaurant. Labashi and I tried many different tastes via the tapas plate. We then walked down into ‘the mall’, i.e., the old section of Boulder which is now a pedestrian mall.
Back at the house we looked at some Alaska pictures but didn’t last long at it before the yawns all around indicated we had had a great day and it was sleepy-time.

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Saturday, 6 September-

Today dawned sunny and bright, a super day in Boulder. After a leisurely breakfast we hung out until lunch time. Labashi’s buddy, Shilla, had agreed to babysit two nephews while their parents attended the football game at nearby Colorado University. She and Labashi had a great time entertaining/teaching the kids while Moth and I went for a walk in the nearby Flatirons. It didn’t take much uphill walking for me to start huffing and puffing in the 5500-foot altitude but Moth took pity on me and stopped to admire the scenery a few times. And what scenery it is. The Flatirons are so fantastic close-up. We wound along several trails leading up to Red Rocks and then descended back into Boulder in a suburban neighborhood where we saw the biggest-racked mule deer I’ve ever seen. What a neighborhood!
After the kids departed we spent the evening with a mini-reunion, talking about the Peter, Paul, and Mary concert at Bucknell, our experiences in Philadelphia at Weekend Workcamps, good times at the youth-fellowship meetings and at Virginia Beach and other such critical growing-up milestones. We even began looking up (and finding) footage of a long-lost classmate on YouTube.

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Friday, 5 September-

This morning we continued north into Rocky Mountain National Park. We viewed an overview video about the park in the west-side visitor’s center and then walked for an hour at Coyote Valley, a beautiful meadow with the creek-like Colorado River on one side and mountains on the other. The trail there was almost too perfect. With a fly-fisherman working the super-clear river with Ponderosa pines as a backdrop, it was a postcard setting.
Mocha Joe then started the long climb up Trail Road’s switchbacks to the 12,000-foot top. We passed treeline early in the journey, but not before seeing snow in the pines along the road. We had had a bit of rain overnight but the temperature had been above 50 at our 7000-foot campground so I didn’t expect to see snow. At the visitor’s center we heard there had been six inches of snow on top and snowplows had been sent out but we didn’t see anything like that. We only saw a dusting on top.
At the tippy-top we pulled off to take some photos of Long’s Peak and pushed the ‘we’re OK’ button on the SPOT.
We then descended into the Moraine Valley. From the top we could see clouds below us and sure enough we soon entered a wet fog and couldn’t see anything from the viewpoints.
In the lower part of the valley we saw many elk, some with magnificent racks that must have been seven feet wide—just incredible. We toured the Moraine Visitor’s Center and viewed the art works from the artists-in-residence program and listened to an old-timer on the visitor’s desk who has been there since 1952.
We had been planning to walk in the Bear Lake area but decided we didn’t have time to do that and keep our day’s schedule.
We drove on down to and through Estes Park and then took route 7 along the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain Park. Upon gaining a few hundred feet of altitude we were soon on pea-soup fog where I had trouble following the yellow center-line at anything over 35 miles per hour. But after an hour of that we descended through an impressive canyon into the town of Lyons, where we turned for Boulder, our goal for the day.
We drove into Boulder following the GPS’s turn-by-turn directions to our friends’ house. This was the home of one of Labashi’s high-school buddies who we’ve not seen in a decade.
We parked Mocha Joe behind their home and had a wonderful dinner with them, catching up on the intervening years.

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Thursday, 4 September-

Last night was a bit warmer (mid-Forties) and very comfortable and this morning we had a perfect blue-sky early-fall morning at our high meadow camp (about 7000 ft altitude).
This morning we drove to the Flaming Gorge Dam and descended to the Green River. This is one of the premier trout-fishing streams in the world. The water is released from the bottom of the impoundment into a beautiful gorge. The trout are rainbows, browns, and cut-throats and they average 18 inches.
We then climbed back up the mountain and crossed the pass to Vernal, amazed by the ever-changing landscape. At nearby Dinosaur National Monument we were disappointed to see the visitor’s center at the Dinosaur Quarry closed. I had visited the Quarry about ten years ago and wanted to show Labashi the incredible sight of hundreds of partially-exposed dinosaur bones still in place in the wall. The visitor’s center was built in such a way that a roof extended out over the quarry wall, providing shade for researchers to ever-so-slowly uncover a specimen at a time for preservation. But the visitor’s center had been built upon “expansive clay” which expands and shrinks and it destroyed the building’s foundation. A temporary visitor’s center has been set up at the old shuttle-bus stop but you don’t get to see the quarry. We took a look at the temporary exhibits (which are impressive in themselves) then moved on.
We soon crossed into Colorado and spent the afternoon crossing it via US 40. Most of that area was very open--- cattle range mostly ---- and we saw dozens of antelope near the road. Late in the afternoon we paused in Steamboat Springs for some replenishment items before continuing toward Rocky Mountain National Park.
We didn’t quite make the Park. By that time it was 1830 and time for a stop so once we entered the Arapaho National Recreation Area we took the first campground sign and found a very nice spot overlooking the lake in Willow Reservoir Campground ($16). The campground caretakers came around and we learned the campground will only be open another two days before closing for the season. It seems such a waste to close it so early in the year.
As we finished supper I noticed a bear on the hillside across the lake, a ‘brown bear’ (as the cinnamon-phase black bears are known locally). When Labashi and I exited the van to look, the bear noticed us and loped into the aspens and out of sight. We looked several more times but darkness soon intruded.

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Wednesday, 3 September-

This morning we drove around Bear Lake and then into Wyoming. By late morning we were at Fossil Butte National Monument. There we saw the most incredibly-detailed fossils. The collection is called the ‘Wyoming Aquarium in Stone’ for the fossils are of tropical fishes, stingrays, crocodilians, palm fronds, sturgeons, turtles, and birds. The Fossil Sea was a huge lake which covered thousands of square miles and now that is gone but the fossil record lives on in the limestone rocks some 7000 feet above sea level.
The fossils were so good that we then visited a local fossil seller (Ulrich’s) where we saw museum-quality fossils for sale and selling in the thousands of dollars. We then drove into nearby Kemmerer where we looked at more fossils.
We then drove south across Wyoming and into Utah. I loved driving across the sage-brush desert for mile after mile and seeing snow-capped mountain-tops in the distance. They’re the High Uintas of the Wasatch Range.
We skirted the High Uintas as we turned more easterly toward Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. There we toured the extraordinary Sheep Creek Geological Loop and photographed rock formations.
We then drove through the spectacular vistas of Flaming Gorge as it overlooks Sheep Creek as we climbed into the mountains. We arrived at the Red Canyon Visitor’s Center after it closed but walked the canyon rim trail. We then drove to the Red Canyon Lodge for dinner and watched five hummingbirds feeding just outside our windows overlooking Greens Lake as we ate.
After dinner we walked a bit at the Red Canyon campground ($15) and talked at some length with a couple from Kansas City who are planning to go to Alaska next summer.
We then returned to the van to read and blog the evening away.

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Tuesday, 2 September-

This morning we woke to an extra-sunny and perfectly-cool day so we drove back into Craters of the Moon park for a walk. We had the Devil’s Orchard all to ourselves. This area has a very pleasant mix of limber-pine trees, sagebrush, and wildflowers, all interspersed among a moonscape of lava boulders and spatter cones.
We then drove to a wilderness trailhead and walked to the ‘tree molds’. These were formed when lava encased a tree trunk and hardened, then the tree material disappeared, leaving a hole in the rock. This walk was a about three miles and ran along the edge of a huge expanse of the rockiest of the park’s lavas—what a nightmare it would be to cross.
We were also treated to quite a show by the Clark’s Nutcrackers. These jay-sized birds enjoy the nuts of the limber pine and are very athletic. They will land in the top of a pine and pick at the pine nuts, often turning upside down in stuffing themselves with the nuts. They have a sub-lingual pouch which can hold about 15 nuts. They eat some of the nuts but cache others for winter. They are so active in doing this that they benefit the pine more by spreading the seeds than they hurt it by eating its seeds.
After lunch we headed east and then south-east toward the south-east corner of Idaho. Along the way we learned about Idaho and nuclear energy. The little town of Arco, Idaho, for example, was the first town to have nuclear-generated electrical power in the US. It’s near the Idaho National Laboratory, a key player in the development of the ‘nuclear Navy’, i.e., nuclear power plants for ships and subs. And as we neared the Lab something was going on… the roads were all blocked off by security… perhaps a drill.
North of Pocatello I saw a billboard advertising free wi-fi at a gas station. This turned out to be a complex owned by the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Nation. The complex had the gas station, a casino, a trading post, and a strip mall of small stores. After filling up I fired up the computer and used the free wi-fi to check email and post a blog update. Gas was $3.85 a gallon here but has been running $4.00 or more through most of Idaho.
After Pocatello we turned more easterly, toward Bear Lake and ranch country. We loved the open spaces and great mountain-top views. We found a Forest Service campground in Montpelier Canyon, just north of Bear Lake ($6). There we met a German couple, Artur and Monika Breyer—the only other campers in the campground. I had gone for a walk and said hello in passing and Artur invited me for a beer. When they learned we were just returning from Alaska, they wanted to know how we liked it, for they’ve been to Alaska several times and they love it. After a bit Monika told me to go get Labashi and we’d have a campfire tonight.
We spent a wonderful evening with them. Each year they take a vacation toward the end of August and it’s always to America or Western Canada. This year they flew into Denver to pick up a rental RV for their trip to Yellowstone and the Black Hills of South Dakota. They are big fans of Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash and it was hilarious to hear Monika sing ‘You’ve picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille’ in her German accent. In a discussion about the importance of travel in our lives, Artur told us a story of going to a neighboring RV to borrow some salt and falling into conversation with an American woman. She asked where he was from and he said he was from Germany. She said ‘Ah, yes’ asked if it hadn’t been a very long drive from Germany.
After we said our goodbyes to the Breyers, we went back to the van and fired up the heater to get ready for bed on this 40-degree evening.

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