Getting Ready to Leave

A few last shots around Grand Junction

For a place where I had always wanted to live, I sure didn’t stay long. That Ole Wanderlust bug had bitten me again. This post is a potpourri of images taken around Grand Junction before taking off on a trip that lasted more than a year. After all, I had a Jeep® again! I had to use it, and boy, did I.

Here’s another shot of that second hoodoo at Devil’s Canyon that I mentioned in this post:

Another hoodoo near Devil’s Canyon

And here’s another shot of the Palisade above Gateway, Colorado from a second trip I took up there (see this post for my first trip). It’s annotated with all of the visible formations there. This is a larger photo than the others: click to enlarge it.

100 million years of geology - the Palisade at Gateway, Colorado

Note that the bottom two formations here - the Moenkopi and the Cutler - are the top two formations a few miles away at Fisher Towers.

I have previously mentioned the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness that is sandwiched between the Colorado National Monument and the Utah state line. There’s a canyon in there called Rattlesnake Canyon that supposedly contains the country’s second-largest collection of natural arches (the biggest, of course, is Arches National Park a few miles away). It’s a grueling trip requiring four-wheel-drive and an exhausting hike, and I only made it to the first arch. But here it is:

Cedar Tree Arch and Rattlesnake Canyon. This is in Wilderness.

I always meant to go back. I never made it.

South of Grand Junction, up above town in desolate wasteland, is an old mica mine that is a popular hike among the locals. The trail does have its pleasant spots:

Along the Mica Mine trail, near Grand Junction

But the mine itself is a bit of a mess:

The old mica mine near Grand Junction

It was April and the desert was starting to bloom. Here are some Evening Primroses that I just couldn’t pass by; they are such a pretty plant:

Tufted Evening-primrose (Oenothera caespitosa) near Grand Junction, CO

Turns out that there are lots of different kinds of Evening Primroses, so it’s a good thing I keep photographing them. And here’s a pretty plant that was all over that area, even into Utah, that has taken me years to ID:

The Westwater Tumble-mustard (Thelypodiopsis elegans) of the Grand Valley

I was seeing these in the desert all the way from Grand Junction to Green River, Utah. I consulted a BLM botanist and she didn’t know what they were. “They’re growing all over your land!” I exclaimed. I was only able to ID it (see photo caption) about a year ago, using a new tool I’d found on the Internet. For what it’s worth, “Westwater” is the name of a mostly-inaccessible canyon on the Utah-Colorado state line that the Colorado River flows through. It surely is a pretty plant.

Only one chore remained: getting Pookie’s winter coat trimmed off. Here’s a (not very good) phone shot of her in the motorhome.

Pookie, needing a fur trim

Her fur gave her a lot of trouble. It was so thick and fine that it matted badly, and she would just give up on taking care of herself. After a trim, she always felt better: more energetic, more adventurous, and she would start cleaning herself again. This is the “before” shot. We hit the road the next day; the after shot is in the next post.