to Vernal, Utah 30 August 2014

Rocky Mountain National Park

"It is a good thing, therefore,
to make short excursions
now and then
-- up among the clouds --
on mountain tops to see better,
what the sun sees, on our return to common everyday beauty."
-- John Muir

Up to 11,963 feet, and the lofty sense of being right on the edge. It is euphoric for me, distinctly unsettling to Rochelle. Might it be because I have been going here all my life? The Rockies were my every summer delight, and while I feel the altitude, it gives me a thrill to be so high.

Shortly after we start down from the ridgetop, we cross the Continental Divide for the last time. From here' it's all downhill to the Pacific, and we're on home territory.

My favorite part is the way the water plays with the rocks and plants. I didn't stop to look at the above-timberline cirques where the vegetation is all low and fine. Down below, at a mere 8,500 feet, where Rochelle can breathe a little easier, I found this delicious little rill chortling among the alpine verdure. This is, if you can imagine, the headwaters of the mighty Colorado River.

We are too late for wildflowers, and the snow is mostly gone. There used to be many glaciers in the two views above, but now they are only rotting snow fields. Lower down, beetle damage has taken more than half of the Lodgepole Pines on the western slope, leaving the parts that have been cleared of standing dead looking naked and forlorn.

One more high pass -- Rabbit Ear -- and then another changed, changed utterly favorite Colorado town, Steamboat Springs, condo-minimized into triviality. Around it still, magnificent mountains. Then down-slope across high desert northwestern Colorado -- oil shale and fracking territory...

Old Highway 40, unbelievably smooth and empty, and 120 miles downslope, we come to the Green River Valley
and ...

The National Park Service does an outstanding job of interpreting. On one side, this monumental wall, where patient archaeologists have chipped and brushed for decades to expose this “logjam of dinosaur skeletons” and facing it, a huge, engaging, humorous, and speculative mural of what this scene might have looked like before the great drought that wiped these creatures out.

Speculative, of course, because there is no way to know what the creatures looked like. But the bones give us an excellent sense of their size.

A wonderful walk down from the quarry through a garden of delicious rocks, variously eroded and desert varnished -- I will for now spare you the images -- a great striped Stink Bug, and a bunch of cute Cottontails -- and then back along the Green River and onward to Vernal and the Dinosaur Inn.