The story so far: Tired of the mountainless terrain in Middle Tennessee, my lady, our cats and I used a motorhome to move to Colorado. We spent about a month getting there, stopping to see & photograph lots of beautiful country along the way.
There are two ways to get from Moab, Utah to Grand Junction, Colorado: the long, fast way and the slow, short way. We opted for the scenic route up the Colorado River — fewer miles but it takes longer.
We picked up some hitch hikers along the way. They were going to Grand Junction.
Now, Pookie was one friendly cat. I’ll write a special story about her later, but know this: she loved every human she ever met, and wanted to be petted by them. Wanted to be really petted. And she took to those hitch hikers.
They petted and petted and petted her, and she still hadn’t had enough. As soon as one got tired of petting, she’d move to the next one. By the time we got to Grand Junction, they were calling her a “slut.” I laughed.
We dropped them off at the rail yard, where they planned to hop a freight train to Denver. We checked in at the Grand Junction KOA, a splendid RV park that I highly recommend, and waited for a time when it wasn’t snowing in the Rockies. To my best recollection, we waited about a week.
So we went up to the Colorado National Monument. A spectacular place that is on a dramatic uplift just south of town. I have many fabulous shots I took there years later, but here are the ones I took on that trip.
The road to the top goes up, and up. Here’s a shot from the top, looking down at the road that we had just climbed:
The land was uplifted from 70 to 40 million years ago and canyons have been eroding in it ever since. The walls of mostly Wingate sandstone erode easily, so the canyons are deep, with some spectacular rock spires left behind.
Beside the road that climbs to the top is a rock balanced on top of one of the spires. It is in the wide-angle shot above, but here’s a telephoto shot of it, taken from the same spot at the top of the Monument:
I was amazed. Here’s a view down into the canyons near the Visitor Center:
There is a campground at the top near the visitor center. To my best recollection, it will accommodate RVs — but I, for one will never drive an RV up there. I would instead recommend the RV park in Fruita, which is very near the Monument’s west entrance.
A few days later we crossed over the Continental Divide with no incidents. We started out in the town of Golden, Colorado - home to Coors Beer and the Colorado School of Mines, one of the top three engineering schools in the country.
I started my job; a work-from-home position with one day a month on site. We would spend the next six months in the motorhome, trying various RV parks in various towns near my work, but our grand adventure road trip was over.
Colorado would be my home for the next eight years. I took tens of thousands of shots there and in neighboring states before moving back to Oregon. There are still many, many photos to share and stories to tell here on Substack.
That was a thoroughly wonderful, stimulating and very interesting ride. I'm sad its over, but I'm sure you have more great photos and story's to share, so I hope you keep up the good work. I don't always have time to do more than pay bills when I'm on-line. my work load is insane right now, but when I have the time too read, I get to try and get to everything at one session and reading the stories and taking deep dives into the pictures is a fantastic diversion..
Anyway, please keep writing, it is my selfish desire to go places vicariously since I can't break away from here and take a much needed vacation.