After our stormy entry into Oklahoma the day before, Friday morning opened clear and dry. We spent the night in
Guymon, a oil and livestock town in the panhandle of Oklahoma. We continued westward, with open vistas like the one above dominating our travels. I was surprised at how much agriculture was present in this area. Eventually, we got into more of the grasslands that I expected to see here in the southern Great Plains, and with this transition came more and more pronghorn antelope:
Our first destination this morning was
Capulin Volcano National Monument (
http://www.nps.gov/cavo/). This volcano stands high above the plains, and starts to mark the transition between the plains and the Rocky Mountains. Here, Hope is reading an interpretive sign to the kids in the bottom of the extinct crater:
This picture is of Stephen at one of the overlooks on top of the volcano:
This area is basically desert, and some of the cactus were blooming, like this prickly pear:
While very thorny, many cacti have very beautiful flowers and are often used
ornamentally in hot, dry places. We continued onward to the Denver area, stopped at a quaint local museum in the village of Folsom, New Mexico, site of a major
archeological find early in the 20
th Century. We arrived at our hotel in the Denver area around 4 p.m., and arranged to meet my high school buddy Matt
Hodek at a local pizza place. Matt moved to Colorado a few years after leaving high school, and now works in architecture and residential construction in the Denver area. We had an enjoyable evening visiting with Matt. We left the Denver area early Saturday morning, heading westward on I-70. This is one of the most beautiful interstate highways we have been on, as it climbs into the high mountains just west of Denver. After driving through the ~1.7 mile long Eisenhower Tunnel (
http://www.dot.state.co.us/eisenhower/description.asp), the highest vehicular tunnel in the world at an elevation of just over 11,000 feet above sea level, we took a brief detour off of the interstate to head towards
Leadville, Colorado, an old mining town. Along the way, we stopped at a little park on a reservoir high in the mountains:
That's Beth in the hooded sweatshirt, longing to romp in the snow of the nearby peaks. We continued up the road a few miles to the pass, which once was home to a small city named "Climax". This town was located over 11,000 feet, and supported a large molybdenum mine (molybdenum is a metal used to harden steel). The mine is still active, although there is no town up there now, just some
interpretative displays:
and, of course, remnant patches of snow for the kids to play in and make snowballs:
It also turns out that one of the peaks in this area, Mt. Arkansas, is the source of the Arkansas River, so we had to get a picture by the small trickle that will eventually become the large river that terminates in our state:
After purchasing some delicious (but expensive) smoked elk tenderloin jerky and buffalo jerky from a roadside vendor, we wound our way back to I-70. Just west of the city of
Glenwood, Colorado, the highway follows the Colorado River through the gorgeous
Glenwood Canyon, which has a large rest area. We stopped here briefly to allow the kids to dip their toes in the very cold water (I walked in, too, and the water was so cold it hurt after just a few seconds!) and they found many pretty rocks to collect (my sister Lisa would have been in heaven).
We watched a few rafters held down the river, and then continued driving into Utah on the interstate. Hope had spotted a small attraction on our highway atlas called "
Sego Canyon
Petroglyphs" (
http://climb-utah.com/Moab/sego.htm). What a find this turned out to be! After driving around a bit trying to find this site on
BLM lands near the tiny town of Thompson, Utah (for those of you who have watched the kid's animated movie "Cars", think "Radiator Springs", only smaller and more desolate), we finally found some signs that pointed the way up a narrow, paved road into a dry canyon. After a couple miles, we came upon the site, which has a series of Indian rock art created over thousands of years by multiple different cultures:
Some, like the mural above, are "pecked" into the dark desert varnish covered rocks, leaving behind lighter colored rocks. The mural above and the mural below were created in this fashion:
Others were put on lighter colored sandstone with red, brown, or black pigments:
Archeologists can only speculate about the role and significance of this artwork, and many of the images depicted are quite ornate and abstract, as you can seen in this close up of the panel shown above:
Most of these
petroglyphs were elevated above the ground a fair amount, but not all were, as you can see in the following picture:
Unfortunately, being located high above the ground is no protection from vandals. As you can probably tell from the pictures I have shown, just about every mural has some
graffiti of some type or another, or bullet holes. The ironic thing is that some of the
graffiti dates to the 1800s or early 1900s, and is now also protected by the
BLM (other federal agencies do this, too), as a historic record! After we explored parts of the small ghost town near these
petroglyphs, we return to the interstate and continued westward. We eventually turned off I-70 onto US highway 6, which angles up towards Salt Lake City. We stopped a few miles along this highway along a
BLM road (oh,
BLM is the federal agency "Bureau of Land Management", who ended up with a lot of the non-forested public domain in the western US that didn't go to the Forest Service or the Park Service). Our goal was to let the kids see what the desert of eastern Utah was like:
In addition to being warm and dry, this particular stretch held another intriguing feature: loads of small rocks that appear to be some type of marine fossils, probably dating back millions of years! I'll try to find out more on these later... Today (Sunday) we're planning to visit Adrian and Christen
Grell and their young daughter. Adrian and Christen are displaced Minnesotans, friends we made in Monticello when they were working for the
UAM School of Forestry. They now work for the Forest Service in Salt Lake City. We should arrive in Boise, Idaho by this evening, and we'll be in Boise for most of the next week.
After our stormy entry into Oklahoma the day before, Friday morning opened clear and dry. We spent the night in Guymon, a oil and livestock town in the panhandle of Oklahoma. We continued westward, with open vistas like the one above dominating our travels. I was surprised at how much agriculture was present in this area. Eventually, we got into more of the grasslands that I expected to see here in the southern Great Plains, and with this transition came more and more pronghorn antelope:
Our first destination this morning was Capulin Volcano National Monument (http://www.nps.gov/cavo/). This volcano stands high above the plains, and starts to mark the transition between the plains and the Rocky Mountains. Here, Hope is reading an interpretive sign to the kids in the bottom of the extinct crater:
This picture is of Stephen at one of the overlooks on top of the volcano:
This area is basically desert, and some of the cactus were blooming, like this prickly pear:
While very thorny, many cacti have very beautiful flowers and are often used ornamentally in hot, dry places. We continued onward to the Denver area, stopped at a quaint local museum in the village of Folsom, New Mexico, site of a major archeological find early in the 20th Century. We arrived at our hotel in the Denver area around 4 p.m., and arranged to meet my high school buddy Matt Hodek at a local pizza place. Matt moved to Colorado a few years after leaving high school, and now works in architecture and residential construction in the Denver area. We had an enjoyable evening visiting with Matt. We left the Denver area early Saturday morning, heading westward on I-70. This is one of the most beautiful interstate highways we have been on, as it climbs into the high mountains just west of Denver. After driving through the ~1.7 mile long Eisenhower Tunnel (http://www.dot.state.co.us/eisenhower/description.asp), the highest vehicular tunnel in the world at an elevation of just over 11,000 feet above sea level, we took a brief detour off of the interstate to head towards Leadville, Colorado, an old mining town. Along the way, we stopped at a little park on a reservoir high in the mountains:
That's Beth in the hooded sweatshirt, longing to romp in the snow of the nearby peaks. We continued up the road a few miles to the pass, which once was home to a small city named "Climax". This town was located over 11,000 feet, and supported a large molybdenum mine (molybdenum is a metal used to harden steel). The mine is still active, although there is no town up there now, just some interpretative displays:
and, of course, remnant patches of snow for the kids to play in and make snowballs:
It also turns out that one of the peaks in this area, Mt. Arkansas, is the source of the Arkansas River, so we had to get a picture by the small trickle that will eventually become the large river that terminates in our state:
After purchasing some delicious (but expensive) smoked elk tenderloin jerky and buffalo jerky from a roadside vendor, we wound our way back to I-70. Just west of the city of Glenwood, Colorado, the highway follows the Colorado River through the gorgeous Glenwood Canyon, which has a large rest area. We stopped here briefly to allow the kids to dip their toes in the very cold water (I walked in, too, and the water was so cold it hurt after just a few seconds!) and they found many pretty rocks to collect (my sister Lisa would have been in heaven).
We watched a few rafters held down the river, and then continued driving into Utah on the interstate. Hope had spotted a small attraction on our highway atlas called "Sego Canyon Petroglyphs" (http://climb-utah.com/Moab/sego.htm). What a find this turned out to be! After driving around a bit trying to find this site on BLM lands near the tiny town of Thompson, Utah (for those of you who have watched the kid's animated movie "Cars", think "Radiator Springs", only smaller and more desolate), we finally found some signs that pointed the way up a narrow, paved road into a dry canyon. After a couple miles, we came upon the site, which has a series of Indian rock art created over thousands of years by multiple different cultures:
Some, like the mural above, are "pecked" into the dark desert varnish covered rocks, leaving behind lighter colored rocks. The mural above and the mural below were created in this fashion:
Others were put on lighter colored sandstone with red, brown, or black pigments:
Archeologists can only speculate about the role and significance of this artwork, and many of the images depicted are quite ornate and abstract, as you can seen in this close up of the panel shown above:
Most of these petroglyphs were elevated above the ground a fair amount, but not all were, as you can see in the following picture:
Unfortunately, being located high above the ground is no protection from vandals. As you can probably tell from the pictures I have shown, just about every mural has some graffiti of some type or another, or bullet holes. The ironic thing is that some of the graffiti dates to the 1800s or early 1900s, and is now also protected by the BLM (other federal agencies do this, too), as a historic record! After we explored parts of the small ghost town near these petroglyphs, we return to the interstate and continued westward. We eventually turned off I-70 onto US highway 6, which angles up towards Salt Lake City. We stopped a few miles along this highway along a BLM road (oh, BLM is the federal agency "Bureau of Land Management", who ended up with a lot of the non-forested public domain in the western US that didn't go to the Forest Service or the Park Service). Our goal was to let the kids see what the desert of eastern Utah was like:
In addition to being warm and dry, this particular stretch held another intriguing feature: loads of small rocks that appear to be some type of marine fossils, probably dating back millions of years! I'll try to find out more on these later... Today (Sunday) we're planning to visit Adrian and Christen Grell and their young daughter. Adrian and Christen are displaced Minnesotans, friends we made in Monticello when they were working for the UAM School of Forestry. They now work for the Forest Service in Salt Lake City. We should arrive in Boise, Idaho by this evening, and we'll be in Boise for most of the next week.
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