Black Canyon

We left Breckenridge Thursday morning and headed south and west... to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. We stopped at Curecanti National Recreation Area and had a picnic lunch, then drove on to the south entrance of the park. We found our campsite, pitched our tent, and hit up the main visitor center. All we had was our crappy disposable camera but we stopped and took pictures at most of the lookout points on the South Rim.

It was my bright idea to drive down to the bottom (East Portal) and get a good look at the dam. Keeper's little car is a fine automobile. But it was not meant for driving down a canyon. The road was paved, yes, but very very very steep. We made it to the bottom and noticed a funny smell. Keeper popped the hood and smoke came out. Uh-oh. After some quick pictures, we drove back out of the canyon, the whole time I'm saying, "please God, just let us get back to the top" over and over in my head. I imagined us being stranded and having to walk miles to a ranger station (no cell phone service in this wilderness). We made it out and went back to our campsite.




We decided to be nerds and go to the park activity scheduled for Thursday night after dinner: a 9pm Astronomy Lecture. We met in the park's ampitheater with just about everyone else that was spending the night. We were treated to a general astronomy lecture (sounds boring but was quite interesting to nerds like us) by a public school teacher from Florida (which may be almost as a bad as Arizona when it comes to public schools) who was spending his month of July being the Astronomy speaker at the park every Thursday night. After the lecture, it was nice and dark and we hiked up to a parking lot where 2 rangers and one member from the local astronomy club had set up 3 super-hi-tech telescopes. We had another half hour "constellation tour" by another ranger (so cool) and then we got to look through the telescopes. We saw a globular cluster, Saturn, and Jupiter + four of its moons. So. Freaking. Cool. Black Canyon is one of the best places in the United States to view stars so we really lucked out.

I did not get much sleep that night because of the scurrying rodents/wildlife who kept exploring our plastic tarp on the edges of our tent all night. They make a lot of noise for such little creatures!

We woke up Friday morning and hiked the 3 short trails on the South Rim: Rim Rock Trail, Oak Flat Trail, and Uplands Trail. The weather was much hotter and we were pretty gross even after such short hikes. We drove west and stopped in Montrose (very cute town) for a coffee and then south on the San Juan Skyway to Telluride.