Our Fall Road Trip

We started out in Vail staying with my parents at Austria Haus. The weather turned cold and new snow fell on the mountains the first couple days there. We got to help my Mom celebrate her birthday and our daughter and grandson and my sister and BIL also came for the celebration. Mav loved the pirate ship playground up by the new gondola at Vail Village. We took a drive past Minturn to view the changing trees and drove off the main road to a deserted campground about 8 miles in and had a picnic by a stream. It was a glorious day. 

The next day we headed on out west to Grand Junction on our way to Moab where we had a motel reservation. We took the loop through the Colorado National Monument and stopped at several of the overlooks. There is a beautiful view of the distant mountains and the fertile valley where the Colorado peaches grow.

There are two highways into Moab, Utah it turns out, the winding one that goes through the Colorado River canyon and the other one that is a nice highway by not scenic. We took the scenic route. We had it mostly to ourselves until we hit the construction at the end right before you get to Moab. We had to wait for the flagmen to let us through. It was still worth it. The Colorado River is already muddy colored long before it gets to the Grand Canyon.

Our first day in Moab we went to Arches National Park along with all the other tour buses and RVs in the area. I thought Moab was sort of an out of the way place, but no, it was quite busy and several of the parking lots were completely full of vehicles for the trails that lead to the arches, you can’t see them from the road. We enjoyed the arches but not the crowds. The Asian tourists are into taking glamour shots, sort of like a model posing for a magazine layout, it cracked me up. 

Our second day was spent in The Canyonlands National Park to west of Moab. We chose to drive to the “Island in the Sky” portion that consists of the high plateau that sits between where the Colorado River and the Green River come together both have carved out deep walls into the rock. In all of these places you can see the effects of erosion by wind and water to sculpt the landscape over vast spans of time. The arches will fall eventually but new ones are already being carved. Look for the idiot car on the 4x4 road in the last photo.

On the third day we left Moab and drove through the far western part of Colorado north to Dinosaur National Park. We visited the quarry where there is a massive display of dinosaur bones are left partially excavated from the rock. We ran our hands over the massive thigh bones like all the other tourists, it feels just like rock since that is what it has become.

We spent the night in Craig and drove over to Steamboat Springs and up into the mountains on Buffalo Pass. It was a gravel road and the higher we got the more muddy and slushy it got so we decided to go to Walden via the highway over Rabbit Ears Pass instead. We also drove over Cameron Pass and through the Poudre Canyon on our way home. We could see the debris from the recent flooding wrapped around the trunks of trees at the high water mark. There were places where only one lane was open due to the road bed being eroded away. We logged 1225 miles on the trip.