A Colorado hodge podge, aka Tapping the Rockies

Went  to a Rockies game, not the best team in baseball, but a lovely park. Bleacher  seats for $15 included a $6 meal  and drink credit. Plus coupons for dollar hotdogs  and half price beer before first pitch. Check out the sunset view of the actual Rockies from the park. 

Sitting in the mile high purple row, 5280 ft above sea level

Casa Bonita, watch the South Park episode, you'll  understand

Jim's  bison obsession continues in Boulder 

Visiting Miller Coors, surprisingly,  the banquet beer is delightful

Yes, that's a young Mark Harmon, you're  welcome

Multi-billion dollar joint venture corporation still uses Microsoft Word art ca 1995

Rocky Mountain National Park, aka spying on animals. Here we spotted two downy immature great horned owls having a snuggle.

Big horn sheep. Did you know they have honeycomb  like skulls that absorb impact when they butt heads? No concussions.  Why isn't the NFL studying this for helmet technology? 

Me, on top of a big rock, in an even bigger field. This is the alluvial fan, a debris field from a massive flood a few years ago.

Last view of Colorado. Thanks for hosting us. I think of the state as being like ME, except instead of ocean, they have mountains. Delightful! 

Day 300

 We've been off the grid camping in Yellowstone and Grand Teton (and are going off again to Glacier tomorow) but it's day 300 of the trip so we wanted to shoot out an update.  Here are a few shots from Yellowstone (it's awesome) and we'll try to update some more soon.

I took 8 million photos of bison, but we saw black bears, wolves, yellow bellied marmots, elk, and more.

Road trip hiatus

We took a brief road trip hiatus to fly back to the east coast and celebrate the nuptials of Blair and Kevin. 

We didn't have any fun...

As you can clearly see!

Congrats to the newlyweds! 

Snow, after Memorial Day

We've been following  the Colorado itenerary my friend Peter gave us, and next up was a jaunt down to hike Maroon Bells (the most photographed peaks in the Rockies).

Here you can see the peaks above Maroon Lake, and the beautiful  clear sky

Mid  hike, looking back on Maroon  Lake

On the advice  of the forest ranger, we took the Crater Lake hike. By the time we got to Crater Lake, it was snowing, and still beautiful 

Ohh, and btw, there was still about a foot of snow on the trail. Really glad we bought those waterproof hikers.

Just beyond Maroon Bells, on the way to Independence Pass, we visited some ice caves recommended  to us by some fellow hikers at Crater Lake. These ice flow caves are beautiful,  and easy to reach, though hard to climb back out of. Both of us ended up using  the butt-sled-hope method to explore this little delight.

If you hold on to the rocks, sometimes you can stand up long enough to take a picture

Independence Pass had just opened 6 days before we traversed  it. You can see why. I wouldn't  want to be this plow driver, moving several feet of snow on mountain switchbacks  (we saw two avalanches being cleared while  traveling the pass). On the road, you drive higher than the tree line. Between the white clouds, snow, and lack of much else, it looks like you're  driving into the sky.

The high point on Independence  pass is the highest point where you can cross the continental  divide in a car. (Continental Divide, essentially the ridge back on the US, water flowing west off the mount reaches the Pacific, east, the Atlantic)

Arches National Park

Arches is one of the more popular national parks and we were there on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend so it was busy.  We hoped to make the best of it and did have to wait about 45 minutes to get in but then we found parking throughout the park easily which was lucky.  Apparently the Utah state patrol stopped letting people in around noon because there was over a mile back up to get in.

It is a beautiful place but we had seen a lot of the same landscape over the past week or so and were getting a little red rocked and sandstoned out.  Still, there are some worthwhile sights here.

A lot of the time when we take selfies we completely block what we are trying to capture.  This time we blocked it and created something obscene coming out of our heads so that's a double whammy.

Here is balanced rock balancing.

This looks like a face and makes me think of Old Man on the Mountain in New Hampshire, but that collapsed a long time ago and this will eventually too as that's how this type of rock works.

I know what you're thinking.  Isn't this place called Arches National Park?  Where are the arches?  Here you go.  There are over 2000 in the park.

This also kind of looks like a face.

This is double arch.  It's one of the cooler ones up close.

For perspective that little blue dot is Chrissy.

Underneath double arch.

This is landscape arch.  It looks a lot like Owachomo bridge.  Overall, I liked the bridges better.  You can't walk underneath this one because it is too unstable.

This is delicate arch which is the most famous and most worthwhile thing to see in the park.  It's on the Utah license plates.  It's about a mile and a half hike uphill but the view is worth it.

This picture is a bit dark but again for perspective we are down there at the bottom.

And of course, it would be remiss not to point out Chrissy's junior ranger accomplishments.

Dinosaurs and Canyonlands

Because  the Colorado Plateau  was at one time an inland sea, and also a tropical climate (think Pangea) it has both interesting geological  features,  and a high concentration of dinosaur  fossils.

At the Dinosaur  Museum in Blanding, UT, you can see many fossils, historic models, and dinosaurs depicted  through the ages.  Here is a photo through  a light box recreating images from the first Dino film, The Lost World.

Also, extensive work has gone into the exhibition to stress that many dinosaurs may have actually  had feathers. If these dinosaurs had a flighted ancestor, then they are flightless birds. If the ancestor is not a bird, then they are just a dinosaur with feathers. Lots of work is being done to fill in the knowledge in the evolutionary time line gap. In the meantime, these scale feathered models are still pretty scary.

On to Canyonlands National Park.  The park is broken  into 3 accessible  sections. We visited Needles. Because of that whole inland sea thing,  a salt done developed beneath  the earth's  crust, pushing up the sandstone and breaking it into fins. The salt then dissolved thanks to millions of years of rain, and thanks to that settling plus wind and sand erosion, we're  left with Needles.  A strange red rock and Sandstone landscape.

Wooden Shoe Arch 

Hiking in Needles, follow the cairns  ( the small piles of rocks here in the foreground) or you will get lost very quickly

See the Needles

Also, Ravens everywhere. This one decided to decorate our car.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Natural Bridges is basically in the middle of nowhere in Utah.  It's about 40 miles to the nearest town.  It has some of the darkest skies in the country and some of the best stargazing.  I saw a picture of it in a book and decided we needed to go there.  On a road trip like this you don't need much more of a reason.  There are three naturally created bridges in the canyon at the park that we visited via an 8.6 mile hike.  6.6 in the canyon and then 2 miles across the mesa back to the car.  The canyon hike is awesome but the last 2 miles back were a little rough.  Then again, we're not exactly seasoned hikers.

Fun fact number one:  the difference between a bridge and an arch is that bridges are created by moving water and arches are created by other forces (frost, erosion, etc.)  Fun fact number two: the difference between a national park and a national monument is that Congress has to vote for a park but the president can designate a monument.  Theodore Roosevelt made Natural Bridges a monument in 1908.

This first bridge is Sipapu.  It's crazy how the perspective changes based on how you are looking at the bridge.  The views from down in the canyon are our favorite.  Also notice how small I am.  These are big bridges.

There were ancient Puebloans in the area (as in most of the Colorado Plateau) and here's something they left behind.  

Hiking through the canyon is fun let alone the bridges.  Chrissy calls that cactus the heartcus

This is Kachina.  It's the thickest of the three.

This is Owachomo.  Again notice how the perspective changed based on where we were we were.  In the third shot it's actually kind of hard to pick out the bridge.

There are 13 first come first served camp sites in the park and we were lucky enough to snag one.  It's been unseasonably cooler this spring and one of our air mattresses deflated, but we've had fun camping.