Author: bjregan

Enjoying retirement activities. Main goals for retirement are to stay spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally healthy.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

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.
park entrance

Lee is enjoying the view at the first lookout.

canyon 1

canyon3

canyon 2

Painted Wall, at 2300 feet, the highest wall in Colorado.
On the road north from Grand Junction we saw one of the fires that had been making all the smoke.

Rockin’ On

What in the world am I going to do with all of these rocks I collected during the Albuquerque Gem and Mineral Society field trip that Lee and I went on yesterday? It was fascinating to poke around in the vast desert arroyos and marvel at the variety of interesting rocks. I couldn’t stop picking them up and putting them in my bucket for further study. But now that I have them here at home I can’t imagine what I’m going to do with them. I’m just not a collector.

The field trip was billed as an expedition to the Rio Puerco, which we had no idea of what to expect or exactly where it might be. Since we know the 230-mile extent of this river (‘rio’ is the Spanish word for ‘river’) currently has no water in it, we figured it would be somewhere out in the desert. Lee didn’t care about collecting rocks but decided to go so he could check for desert wild flowers.

We both enjoyed seeing this desolate area southwest of Albuquerque, way down a dirt road we never would have explored on our own. It was actually an escarpment that was cut by multiple arroyos that would have drained into the Rio Puerco basin in the valley below at such times in the past when there might actually have been water. I studied geology last semester, but can only make a guess, at this point, to say that because there used to be a lot of sediments carried down the arroyos could be why there are now so many interesting rocks laying around everywhere.

One of the arroyos. Look closely and there are vehicles, as well as a fellow rock collector in the distance.
Lee got lots of flower photos. I just saw a few cactus blossoms.

I’m taking a ‘Geology of New Mexico’ class this semester. The rocks are one of the many features of our Land of Enchantment that I appreciate and enjoy. But I think I just have to leave them out there where God put them in the first place. That way they will be there for others to enjoy and for me to see the next time. My main goal is to know what rocks I’m looking at and to understand how they might have gotten there to begin with. Of course, you could never know for sure. Some eager ‘collector’ like me could have gotten tired of having a bunch of rocks sitting around and taken them and dumped them out at a random location nowhere near where they were collected. Hmm….is there somewhere I could take my collection and leave it to mystify the next person?