Up Before the Sun

I don’t get it. It’s still dark out when I get up, but now it’s dark when I get home from work, too. What a stupid idea.

Wow.

Let me tell you, we just came back from one of the local bar & grills (it’s not really a brew pub, but it’s associated with Breckenridge Brewery so they have semi-local beers) and I had the most amazing beer I think I’ve ever had.  It was their Vanilla Porter (which is pretty good in its own right) which had been aged in a used bourbon barrel.  Wow.  Amazing.  Dee-lish.  If anyone out there ever comes through my area of Colorado, I highly recommend stopping by The Ale House and trying it out.

And then when we got home we saw this sunset:

 

And all was good.

Correct me if I’m wrong…

It must be fall.  Do you want to know how I can tell?

There’s a problem

That right there is water… in between the panes of glass.  How much is a new, big picture window?

Photodump: Lake Powell

We got to the lake just as the sun was going down, and my uncle picked us up in his little purple speedboat. Unfourtunately it was too dark by that time to really see any of the landscape; the moon on the water was the only thing visible.

But the next morning when the sun came up…

Blue water, blue skies, and only red rocks and sand in between them. 

There’s the little houseboat–just big enough. We had a party of four adults and one cute little girl (seriously–only four years old, but she was hilarious), and we were comfortable, but there are four bunks, two fold-down couch/bed things, you could sleep under the awning up top, or you could even pitch a tent on the beach if you aren’t afraid of coyotes.  Enough room for as many friends as you want to bring, or as few.

Miles and miles of canyons.  Lake Powell, when it’s full, actually has a larger coast line (around 1900 miles) than the entire west coast of the US (around 1200 miles).  It’s really amazing to see.

A (slightly blurry) cormorant in Halls Bay, where we camped for most of the time.  My uncle, the mechanic of old vehicles he is, pointed out that the logo of Packard Motor Car Company had a cormorant in it.

And this guy kept buzzing us as we puttered around in the purple boat one day.  He was doing touch and gos. I love me some piper cubs and I love me some seaplanes–so I have more pictures of this than could be considered perfectly reasonable…

We camped next to this little rock, so I had to go out on top of it.

The water was somewhere around 74 degrees, definitely on the chilly side, but not so much so that you couldn’t go swimming for a while before the cold got to you.  And you couldn’t have asked for nicer weather, with hardly a cloud in the sky, highs of around 80, and lows in the 50’s. 

And here, in Lost Eden Canyon, there’s a really cool overhang/amphitheater thing the water is still a couple hundred feet deep under there, so we just bobbed along marveling at it for a little while.

The formation on the west side of Halls Bay, where we camped, is called Waterpocket Fold, because of all the slick rock potholes that collect water, and stay wet even in the summer.  This arch was only a short hike up from our campsite.  And you can barely see my uncle waving back at me from on top of it.

Behind the arch are a bunch of the water filled potholes, which just keep going up the drainage in a string like that.  Saw a few little froggies living in the holes.

And, in the southwest, where there are canyons, there are indian ruins.  This place is called Defiance House, and consists of several of stone dwellings and a kiva up on top of a rubble pile under an overhanging cliff, near the end of the water in Forgotten Canyon.

We also stopped to look at this (you may need to click on the photo to see what I’m talking about).  There are some foot holds carved into the rock right here that come right up from the water and go up the cliff.  My uncle said that he once had himself dropped off there and he climbed up it–at the top are a bunch of areas that were obviously farmed by the natives way in the past.  There are little square plots of dirt, no more than an acre, and channels cut from more potholes for irrigation.  I would have liked to have climbed up myself, but we were running out of daylight and still a ways out from the houseboat.

This past year’s runoff was exceptionally good (you’ve heard me talking on and on about how high the Colorado has been in town here, remember?), the lake hasn’t been this high in many years–only about 30 feet down from high water.  This makes it much easier to get to and from some of these places, where in the recent past it has been necessary to bushwack through miles of tamarisk to get to any of these things. On the one hand, I can see why environmentalists consider Lake Powell to be some sort of disaster–it really is equivalent to flooding the Grand Canyon–but on the other hand having a lake and a boat makes everything so much more accessible.  And there’s that whole “electricity” thing that Glen Canyon Dam does for us.  TANSTAAFL.

Speaking of free lunches, in return for all the fun times, this was the last outing for the year of the little houseboat, so we had to help clean it up and winterize it.  It’s now tied to a buoy in Bullfrog, awaiting next year’s adventures.  Sadly, many of its buoy-mates’ owners seem to have fallen on hard times, what with the economy and all. People are deciding it’s cheaper to give up their dreams and let the boats rot, rust and sink away, forfeiting them for the marina to deal with.  Kind of sad, really.

And speaking of lunches, boy did we eat like kings.  My uncle was expecting a few more people than we ended up with, so between the steak, barbeque pork, and bleu cheese hamburgers, we were all expected to drink up the large supply of beer, gin, cheap tequila, and rum. Well, all of us but the cute little girl.  And with Radio Margaritaville on the satellite radio, we did our best.  I think I gained 5 pounds.

So that was my pretty neat spur of the moment vacation from last weekend.  Hope you’re at least a little envious; otherwise I didn’t do a good enough job writing this all out!

And another Mantis

I’ve seen more of these guys in the past week than I’ve seen in the past 5 years. May have something to do with being in Montana for the fall in the past 5 years, but still, I’ve seen a lot of praying mantises lately. This one was sunning itself in the afternoon sun on the south side of the chicken shed, a nice warm place after the chilly mornings we’ve been having. Not too much longer now and you’ll be able to call it winter…

First Frosts

Photodump: Museum Gun Collection

While my friend from Montana was here, we decided to visit the local Museum of Western Colorado (though actually I think they renamed it recently to something more self important and pretentious). It’s not a huge museum, but they have a pretty darn good gun collection.

Everything from old muzzle loaders to lever actions to sawed off contraptions used by outlaws such as Butch Cassidy.

One of the more interesting guns is a Smith and Wesson lever action pistol.  If I understand correctly, this is what S&W, while still called Volcanic Repeating Arms, got started on.

And one of the most “historical” guns is this revolver, which was owned by Alfred Packer (see the AP carved into the front of the grip?)  In case you didn’t know, ol’ Al was Colorado’s own (alleged) cannibal, and who those wacky hippies at University of Colorado in Boulder named the school cafeteria after.

This display, though, was my favorite, showing the guns used by every Mesa County Sheriff–from single action revolvers all the way up to Glocks.  Most interesting to me were the two guys in the middle who used a couple variants of the proto-1911.  Unfortunately my memory and the photo are too blurry to tell what the museum says the exact models were, but I think the one was a Colt Model 1890[something] and the second was a Colt Model 1900[something].  Anyone out there who thinks they can tell, please comment!

They usually have the Gatling Gun that was at Ft. Crawford, but apparently it was out the day we visited.  Despite that, it was a very enjoyable way to spend a morning.

Photodump: hiking around Ouray

Specifically, we hiked the Albany Loop and Hendrick Spur, which is about 5 miles total, but with a few thousand feet going up and a few thousand coming down. Once again, we hit the area at a just perfect time; the weather was shirtsleeve-pleasant with just a few sprinkles, and all the aspens were turning colors.

From where the truck was parked next to Crystal Lake, looking towards the imaginatively named Red Mountain.

The obligatory “looking up at the trees” picture.

Yellow carpet.

View of Red Mountain from the Hendrick Spur.

View of the road from the top of the Hendrick Spur–it sure doesn’t look as far as what it feels it should be after that hike up the side of the canyon.  It blows my mind that we were right at three or four mines… how the heck did those old timers get supplies up the side of that cliff without dropping it all down the side?

And a view from the road back up to where we were at the aforementioned mines.

The little river running through the valley is yellow-red, and doesn’t have any aquatic life.  According to the signs alongside the road, that’s natural for this area (Red Mountain is red because of how iron-rich the rock is, and it affects everything else) and not because of any mine runoff–though they do mention the mines didn’t help anything.  I wouldn’t want to drink it, at least.

 

Red mountain, again, and with red aspens to go with it.

An old building from the Ironton ghost town site, which is south of where we hiked but still north of Red Mountain Pass.  Apparently in the late 1800’s until the silver bust, Ironton had 300 buildings.

And that is the Yankee Girl mine, which was the richest silver mine in the area.  According to the helpful roadside signs, the ore from this mine was so rich that they could skip the condensing stage and go straight to the smelter.

All told, in just this area between Ouray and Silverton, there were somewhere around 100 mines, and about 3000 people making a living, mostly going after silver.  Adjusted for inflation, billions of dollars worth of silver came out of the ground here.  But when the US demonetized silver, it pretty much killed the silver mines.  Some of the mines had other metals and lived on, but the boom times were definitely over.

Oh, and noodling around on Wikipedia I saw that Ouray was the area that Ayn Rand modeled Galt’s Gulch on.  Ya learn something new every day.

Car Camping

This picture should tell you all you need to know why the eating is better car camping than backpacking:

That’s bacon and a tomato and kale from the garden on some of that cheese-jalapeno bread. At a campsite with this view:

Photodump for yesterday: Grand Mesa

We had real good timing with this, last weekend was “Color Sunday,” where everyone goes up on top of the Grand Mesa to look at the changing colors. Being just a few days behind was probably even better.

The top of the Mesa is above 10,000 feet; it was kinda freaking out my Montana friend that we were higher than the tallest peaks in Glacier NP but didn’t feel like we were on top of a mountain (until you get to the edge and look down).

Today we’re planning on hitting up the local museum in the morning and then hitting the road down to Ouray to go camping for a couple nights. So, just so I don’t wind up like that moron from North Carolina who followed Aaron Ralston’s lead, we’re going to Ouray, and if you don’t hear back from from me by, say, Monday, then it’s time to start the search parties.

Photodump for yesterday: Colorado National Monument

Ute Canyon

The Coke Ovens

Kissing Couple

Independence Monument

Pretty neat place, a big hit with my Montana friend. My pass will work for a week so we may go back and hike some of the canyons.

Another Mantis

This one was inside, and I have no idea how it got there. I put it out on the trumpet vine I’m trying to start:

Hopefully it will make it out to the garden somewhere and eat lots of bad bugs.

A random photo of a dog

We had just emptied a bag of dog food, and it was sitting at the back door to go out to the trash. You turn around, and then suddenly the dog is in the bag licking out the very dregs:

He really likes to eat, much more than the other one.