Wyoming to Utah
April, 2006
Devil's Tower in Wyoming is a huge and fascinating geological structure.
A coal mine in the middle of nowhere.
Rocky Mountain National Park, on the Continental Divide, west of Denver.
Cripple Creek, Colorado
Mt. Yale in the Sawtooth Mountain range in Colorado.
St. Elmo, Colorado, an old mining town in the Sawtooth Mountains; now nearly a ghost town.
The "high point" of our year long road trip.
Another case of late snow preventing folks from reaching a National Forest campground. This couple had been stuck for six hours when we showed up. We were happy to pull them out of the ditch ...
... and, after we spent the night camped in the narrow road, they helped us do what is called a "jack knife turn" the next morning.
A meandering stream.
At the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, there is no water, so we had to gather and melt snow.
The canyon itself is probably the most rugged terrain we saw on our trip.
A mountain pond.
A hot spring flowing out of the earth and crystalizing on stones which folks have piled up over the years
Landscape recovering from a forest fire about 20 years ago.
We were able to visit Mesa Verde and tour several ancient cliff dwellings ...
... as well as a similar, less well-known area in southwestern Utah called Hovenweep National Monument.
This is Goosenecks State Park, part of the ancient meandering San Juan river in southwestern Utah. Meanders usually are converted to straighter rivers over time by periodic flooding which cuts through and straightens the channel, leaving stagnant "ox-bow" loops. In this case the flooding didn't work and now the eroded valley is over 1,000 feet deep. It is now classified as an "embedded meander."
While camped at Goosenecks State Park, we met this young couple from Switzerland who were nearing completion of an 18 month trip from the southern tip of South America to Nova Scotia in eastern Canada in one of the few 4WD Volkswagen campers ever built.
Another view of the embedded meanders which go on for miles.
