Colorado National Monument

Thursday, September 03, 2009
Utaline, Colorado, United States


As you are traveling east or west on I-70 it is hard not to
notice the red rocks formations and canyons of the higher land south of the
highway for the 20 or 30 westernmost miles in Colorado, but it also involves a
significant time commitment to get off the highway and explore the area
contained in Colorado National Monument . Just outside Grand Junction and the
Grand Valley on the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau region, Colorado NM
has equivalent quality scenery and recreational opportunities to better known
national parks in Utah and is sometimes proposed to be upgraded to full
national park status.

That said, though, I’ve spent little time exploring the park
unit. What I did on my previous two trips to the Colorado NM in 1992 and 1999
was to just drive scenic Rim Rock Drive which starts and ends near the
Interstate and runs spectacularly along the top of the escarpment and stop and
take photographs at the overlooks, which is exactly what Doug and I did again
in our rush to get to Green River, Utah for the night.

The Grand Valley and Colorado National monument are at a
lower elevation so very hot through the summer and even into early September. I
want to come back either in spring or a little later in the autumn sometime,
hike some of the trails through the major canyons rather than just look at them
from the roadside overlooks, and stay at one of the park’s campgrounds .

After leaving the national monument, Doug and I made it a
point to stop in Fruita, the last town in Colorado, to stock up on provisions
of the adult beverage kind. You never know where you’re going to be able to
find beer in Utah or what kind it might be, possibly even some of that watery
3.2% stuff. There are a significant number of microbreweries now it Utah, and
the scene isn’t as bleak as it once was, but still good to have some decent
beers on ice in a cooler in case you find yourself in a very dry area of the
state when you can least tolerate it. Doug was very impressed by the drive
through window at the liquor store in Fruita. I’ve spent enough time in the
rural West, especially in Wyoming, that such drive-through windows for booze
don’t seem in any way unusual. Heck, when I lived in Wyoming in the late 1990s
it was not necessarily even illegal to open up your first beer as you were
driving home.

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