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 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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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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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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After getting the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle back from the repair shop (following my close encounter with a falling tree limb), Darlene and I decided to get in another little road trip. I found Carrizo Plain National Monument initially as looking like a nice layover point on our planned way to Joshua Tree National Park, but we ended up deciding to spend our four days just there, exploring the hills and valley.
Carrizo Plain is probably most known for many illustrative pictures of the San Andrea fault cutting across many old creek beds and showing how quickly (geologically) the two plates are moving past each other. It’s also home to some once elaborate Native American rock paintings, at “Painted Rock”. Here’s some great side-by-side images showing the terrible damage these rock paintings have been subjected to over the last century.
In the spring, the valley and foothills are often covered in a brilliantly varied carpet of wildflowers. (See this image search for examples.)
Besides these sights, we got in some hiking, drone-flying and general exploring. I also brought along my newly acquired digital imaging telescope from Unistellar to see what it can do.
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Darlene and I met up with Greg, Erin & Merritt and Resi, Troy & Aiden for a very warm weekend of camping at Pinnacles National Park this past weekend.
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(And sorry guys, the first batch of photos are pretty messed up by my not noticing until our hiking snack break that I had left my camera set at a very high ISO. Just think of it as an old-timey filter…)
Continuing on our way home from Wisconsin, Darlene and I came across Colorado National Monument just outside of Grand Junction and decided to have a look. I’d never heard of this place but the scenery was gorgeous and there were fantastic views and rock formations in every direction throughout the park. We ended up spending a couple of days to check it out and do a little hiking – click through for the full gallery:
On our return trip from Wisconsin, Darlene and I made our way down through Iowa and Missouri and across Kansas with one overnight stop and then into Colorado stopping off in Denver but failing to find anywhere nearby to grab a campsite. (Ended up in a motel parking lot north of Boulder.) We stayed a couple of nights in Rocky Mountain National Park to do some hiking. The long views weren’t all that great because the smoke from the huge California wildfires were filling the skies even in Colorado.
Heading south, we found a spot to camp for a couple of nights in national forest land outside of Winter Park and got in some high altitude (10,000′) mountain biking. We visited Dave and Martha at their new home in Evergreen before continuing west on I-70. We camped out a couple of nights and did some trail riding in the hills above Eagle and had to wait out the mud in the morning in order to get the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle™ safely down the mountain again.
We also took some time to ride along Glenwood Canyon and tried to hike up to Hanging Lake late in the evening but ran out of time. We came across a mama bear and her two cubs climbing in the trees near the trail though:
