Friends at various times have encouraged us to visit the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. While it did sound interesting, it never seemed to fit in with our travel plans. That changed on this year’s visit to Salmon, Idaho. Normally, we would take 2 days for the 1000-mile drive from Albuquerque to Salmon, staying overnight in Price, Utah. But we took an extra half-day this time and drove a longer route that went through western Colorado.
There wouldn’t be a lot of extra time to spend along the way but we would be driving through a part of Colorado we hadn’t seen before. We made plans to spend Tuesday night in Montrose, CO, and Wednesday night in Rock Springs, WY. Wednesday would have some flexibility, as far as time to stop and look at some of the interesting places we knew were on the route.
It was the desk clerk at the motel in Montrose who suggested we check out Black Canyon of the Gunnison. She said the entrance was a 20-minute drive out on the highway east of town. Lee usually has scoped out ahead of time all the points of interest so I was surprised that he didn’t know we were that close. Even though we needed to head west out of town this morning, we decided to take the short detour to the east and check out the canyon. That turned out to be a good decision.
“Spectacular” is the one adjective that kept coming to mind as we drove along the South Rim Road, stopping at each of the 11 overlooks. Well, not quite, as we saw the time slipping by we did skip a couple of overlooks. This is definitely a place worth coming back to spend more time exploring. Especially since August is the height of fire season in the West. Like our trip to Glacier National Park last August the dramatic views of distant vistas that we should have been seeing were lost in a haze of smoke from a number of different wildfires.
Living Wonderously 
Wow! Never even heard of it.