As part of our month-long Colorado road trip, we decided to check out the Museum of the Mountain West in Montrose after seeing it in Atlas Obscura. Jim was our friendly tour guide for several hours and it proved to be quite an amazing collection of old west artifacts. Very easy to recommend – check it out – but you’ll want a guided tour as as a lot of rooms are now cordoned off for self-guided visitors. (They kept having thefts.)
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As part of our month-long Colorado road trip, we spent a day exploring the south side of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. And yes, it is an incredibly deep, steep and narrow canyon! We camped on some BLM land just outside of the park and spent a full day gawking at the canyon from the various viewpoints, including hiking out the Warner Point nature trail.
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As part of our month-long Colorado road trip, we found ourselves in Creede and immediately discovered the incredible scenery of the 17-mile Bachelor Historic Mining Loop starting just outside of town. We camped on a spur of the loop and then proceeded to follow the historic loop and gawk at the incredible scenery. I do regret that we didn’t choose to ride our bikes along the route instead but it was still fantastic to see.
Later that day we decided to make our way up to the staging area (at 11,000 ft) for the Wheeler Geologic Area, based on an entry from Atlas Obscura. You can’t actually easily drive the whole way as the dirt road gets seriously messed up and eroded away at points requiring serious 4WD maneuvering. (Most people seem to take ATV’s or other off-highway vehicles.) There is also a hiking trail but that’s best done as an overnight backpacking trip as it’s seven miles just to the trailhead leading to the formations. We opted to follow the 4WD road on our mountain bikes as they aren’t allowed on the hiking trail. (Except for the carve out for the dirt road, this is deep inside a designated wilderness area.) Interestingly, the Wheeler Geologic Area used to have national monument status until 1950.
As it turns out, the road goes way out-of-the-way to get there (14 miles) and it both gives up and regains a lot of elevation along the way. Doing 30 miles round trip from our nearby boondocking site at 11,000 ft of elevation with a two-and-half-mile hike in the middle to actually see the formations turned out to make for a seriously brutal day – and that was with our electric-assist mountain bikes. It was however a gorgeous ride and the geological formations are very cool – definitely worth the effort of getting there.
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As part of our month-long Colorado road trip, we spent a couple of days at the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
We rented some rather worn out sand sleds, hiked to the high point of the first ridge (while fighting the strong high winds that day) and eventually managed to get the sleds working well enough to glide back down.
We had also planned to take the 4WD route over the mountains (Medano Pass Primitive Road) but were put off by the reports of very deep sand to get through. We did hike up to see the nearby, cool-to-see Zapata Falls though.
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In early August, I met up with Darlene on her way back from Wisconsin and we spent a few days hanging out (and playing games) with Dave and Martha at their home in Conifer, Colorado. We then headed out in the camper van to wander around exploring a bit of Colorado for most of a month. On our return, Darlene kidnapped Martha and brought her back to California to stay with us for a few days.
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Humboldt Redwoods State Park (California)
With Darlene out in Wisconsin visiting her family, I loaded up the van with Pan and Hera and headed up to the Pacific Northwest for a couple of weeks, visiting with my brother and some friends in the Portland/Vancouver area as well as exploring a bit of countryside – while avoiding the smoke from the wildfires already flaring up.
 Visiting with Corey and his family |
 And with Jon & Siobhan |
Glenn and Michele then joined me in their new van for a little tour around Olympic National Park.
Hiking in Olympic National Park (Washington)
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We drove out to the sea cliffs near Pescadero Beach this morning to see if we could spot some whales. We lost the sun on the way over but we did get to see what I think were gray whales as they swam near us for a while:
After a couple of days layover in Tahoe to ski some new snow and repair the van (a badly installed anti-sway bar), we headed off again – north this time towards Lassen National Park. Along the way, we spent an afternoon riding as far as we could (before being turned back by snow) up the Mills Peak Lookout trail near Greagle, checked out the Subway Cave near Old Station, wandered around some rough forest roads, visited Burney Falls – and in Burney I was finally able to snag a covid vaccination shot!
The highway through Lassen was still closed to vehicles as they continued to clear the snow but open to biking which made a lovely ride to the top from the southwest entrance. We made two attempts at hiking the Chaos Crags trail on the other side of the park (after getting caught in a thunder and hail storm) and pushed past the still snow covered road to check out the Fantastic Lava Beds area.
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