Day trips: Junior & Hunting Camp

For a small town, Craig has a number of fun diversions....

One afternoon Allan, Connie, Daisy, Julie and I drove out to visit this museum.  

I posted about the museum three years ago so I will skip doing it again, but it is very interesting and well worth a visit.

The kitty with the glowing eyes is the ruler of the museum and she did not like Daisy sniffing around her territory.  The proprietor suggested we be careful because kitty has been known to attack interlopers --and she always wins.

A far more gentle beast known as 'Junior' was waiting for a handout.

He had been found as a calf one hunting season and was raised here at the museum.  He is the museum's second elk orphan to become a pet.

He is so docile he took carrots from my hand.

 Daisy could not quite figure out those big dogs.

Our next trip was to visit Allan's hunting camp high up in the mountains south of Craig.  Allan and a few of his friends purchased this ranch many years back and have enjoyed it as a retreat and a great place to 'get their limit' every fall in deer and elk.

During the summer the ranch is used for sheep grazing. 

The sheep are the only occupants for miles in any direction; except for the deer, elk, rabbits, coons, porcupines, bears and the sheep-keeper (shepherd?) This wagon is his house. Not too different than what I live in but his surroundings are much more fantastic.

Is there anything more magical than a stand of aspens?

Way down in the middle of those quaking aspens you will see one of two cabins that Allan and his friends built on the property.

A bit rustic but comfortable and....

...well, rustic. 

The porch was a perfect place to sit and, well, sit.

There is a kitchen, a table for meals, and a bunk, but no internet, no phone service, no TV, no electricity, no noise, no neighbors, no traffic.   

The view from the porch.

Yes, there really is such a place.

She loved it...

No, I won't take your leash off.  You would be lost in a nano second, chasing butterflies.

See what I mean.

Yippee!

The Colorado columbine.

"Do you want to be best friends?"

An afternoon storm passed over,  sprinkled the hills a moment, then moved on.

Allan spotted a bear on the hillside but I couldn't see it.

 After dinner he built a fire and we relaxed some more before heading back down the mountain. 

Is it worth it to have this ranch for hunting and playing?  

Well, if I could visit here regularly I could probably throw away my blood pressure medications.  

And Allan informed me that it had been years since he had to buy any meat at the grocery store. 

During the three days of my visit I ate:

Smoked duck

Smoked trout

Trout Caviar

Goose steaks

Moose steaks

Elk steaks

Venison Bratwurst

and 

Elk Italian Sausage

Much of it was thanks to this lovely ranch, and it was all delicious!

Grand Junction vs Craig, Co

Why do I avoid RV parks?  Most KOA's and anything with a swimming pool, hot tub, or nightly Bingo, are usually too expensive. (I consider anything more than $40 per night to be too expensive.  After all, I am doing nothing more than parking and sleeping.)

When I arrived in Grand Junction it was 105 degrees.  I needed to do laundry, I wanted to run the air conditioner at least to sleep, and I was in no mood for a Walmart or Cracker Barrel.  I pulled off the road and proceeded to call every RV park, state park, fairgrounds, etc for 50 miles around only to discover there was only one space left anywhere, in an RV park hidden behind a used car dealer on the outskirts of town. It was Father's Day weekend and there were dad-type festivities planned all over  town and obviously that included taking Dad RVing.

The price per night was $44 dollars but I was desperate.  If I had seen the park before registering I would have passed on it but I took it on faith and paid the bill for one night.  Once inside I was reminded why Cracker Barrels and Walmarts are not the worst and sometimes are downright luxurious.

The weeds were full of litter and dog poop.

The tables were not seat-worthy, the laundromat was grungy, the showers and toilets were locked up. It was late in the day but I rushed back to the office to get a refund,  only  to discover, the attendant had gone for dinner.  There was no phone number anywhere to call someone.  Besides, what were my other choices?  And I was nearing a heat stroke.

I plugged into their electricity (yeah! It worked!), ate supper and watched out the window as two police cars pulled up to chat with the guy next door to me.

No one was arrested but the police had a long and serious discussion with a rather scruffy looking guy who seemed somewhat drunk.  I was gone the next morning by 8 am.

It was a lovely drive from Grand Junction to Craig where I found my nephew Allan and his friend, Connie (who had been a hostess and tour guide for me in Canada the previous summer.)

Daisy found several new friends--Julie, a chocolate lab...

...and Connie, who helped her retrieve her ball every time it fell in their pond.

She is starting to like getting her feet wet.

She was especially interested when Julie went into the water.  Allan has done a marvelous job training Julie, I was tempted to let Daisy stay with him for a month to break a few bad habits.

I wrote about Allan's house several years ago but, in case you missed it:

The house is built against that stone cliff and the picture above was taken while standing on his roof.

Deer live and graze on his roof and two baby fawn with their mama are residing on top of his house at this time.

Craig is another of those lovely small towns that is suffering with loss of jobs.  I would hate to see it die as so many others have across the country.

The natural world is everywhere, in and around the town.  Such a rarity, we should be protecting and appreciating it more.

This was a great place to park for a few days--a real Eden.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison River

My goal was The Black Canyon of the Gunnison but first, I had to cross Monarch Pass.

Forty five miles to go, just under 25 MPH, and I am at 10,186 ft high.  (Phew, two miles up and the oxygen is getting thin!)

I stopped the RV to get a picture of this open pit mine that had denuded the area.  I was panting heavily when I climbed back in the vehicle. Daisy did not even try to convince me she wanted to go outside.

Another 500 ft and I was picking up speed.  Spirit is a champ. 

The Top! No over-heating, no huffing or puffing, no problems.  11,326 FEET!

 

I even spied some butterflies.  Who knew they would live that high up?

The trip to the bottom was a whole lot faster.

 Campgrounds began to appear along this reservoir where the Tomichi and Gunnison rivers converged.

We camped within feet of the lake and, even without tall trees, it was cool.

Water is everything in the west.

Checking in to the park I was told, "At 24 ft you are too long to drive to the bottom of the canyon.  Your vehicle can only travel on the rim."  

Looking down to the bottom I agreed, the rim was good enough for me.

At its narrowest the bottom is only 40 feet wide.

 The Black Canyon derives its name from  the fact that parts of the gorge only receive 30 minutes of sunlight a day.

Occasionally I would spy a vehicle at the bottom but nowhere could I discern a road.  Was there an elevator?

The rise and tilting of 1.7 billion year old basement rocks, formed the Gunnison uplift sixty million years ago.  This uplift provided a base for the young, two million-year-old Black Canyon.

 Streams flowed over an open, flat plain with little erosive power.

 

20 to 30 million years ago, volcanic eruptions formed the mountains to the north and south. Volcanic ash and debris forced the Gunnison River to flow across the uplift.

The River became trapped within the metamorphic rock that makes up the core of the Gunnison uplift. As the river eroded downward through this rock, it carved the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

The canyon is so formidable that a ranger informed me, "No signs of habitation by native peoples existed in the canyon when it was first explored by the Europeans.  The Ute were superstitious about it and avoided the canyon as 'unfriendly."

The canyon was first mapped by Captain John Williams Gunnison in 1853.  He might have heeded their superstitions, he was killed by Ute warriors soon after his visit.

At 2300 feet, Painted Wall is the highest cliff in Colorado.  

If the Empire State Building stood on the canyon floor, it would reach slightly more than halfway to the top of the cliff.  The patterns that inspired the name Painted Wall were created more than a billion years ago when molten rock was squeezed into fractures and joints in the existing rock, then cooled and hardened.

Talk about Infrastructure!

In 1881, William Jackson Palmer's Denver and Rio Grande railroad had reached Gunnison from Denver. The line was built to provide a link to the burgeoning gold and silver mines of the San Juan mountains. The rugged terrain precluded using 4' 8 1/2" standard rail; Palmer decided to go with the narrower 3' gauge. It took over a year for Irish and Italian laborers to carve out a 15-mile roadbed from Sapinero to Cimarron, costing a staggering $165,000 a mile. The last mile is said to have cost more than the entire Royal Gorge project.^[11]

On August 13, 1882, the first passenger train passed through the Black Canyon. The editor of the Gunnison Review-Press rode in one of the observation cars; he remarked that the canyon was "undoubtedly the largest and most rugged canon in the world traversed by the iron horse. 

(All Italics is from literature provided by the park or from Wikipedia)