Snow Mass, Colorado
Carbondale, Colorado
Moab, Utah
Sleeping in a bed and having a shower supplied by Megan and her more than hospitable parents may have been more satisfying than graduating with an undergraduate degree from college. The morning started around 9:30A.M. with a cup of coffee and a half hour of staring at our atlas with Megan’s dad plotting our next move. We had anticipated heading to Yosemite but the roads were closed with ice and snow. We settled on Moab, Utah to see the rock arches and then onto Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
After our impromptu planning session we met up with our newfound friends from the night before for breakfast as a phenomenal diner in Carbondale, the next town over. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can replace the satisfaction from a hearty diner breakfast. Everyone chatted of his or her plans to raft, mountain bike, or hike for the day and we began questioning if we were really living in the right place. Megan had planned a hike for us, which was desperately necessary to exercise our bodies after so much time in the car. The following morning, Memorial Day, her and a few of her friends were hiking the Sopris Mountain, hoping to summit before noon and ski down one of its broad faces. We were going to do the first portion of this hike to locate the snowline with her for the following morning. Hiking in the Rockies had seemed more of a pipe dream thus far, and after having just a small hint of the experience I’m still questioning whether such sheer beauty is possible.
After the hike we bid farewells with our wonderful host, old friend, and new friend and headed on the 4-hour drive to Moab in search of the infamous stone arches that grace the Utah license plate. Again, it was a beautiful drive filled with mountains of a completely different sort than found in Colorado. They are a deep red color and have formed from thousands of years of natural erosion.
The story of this leg of the trip wouldn’t be complete without some of the hilarity often found on journeys through the mid-west. En route to Moab we finally got off of Super 70 (Route 70, which we’d been traveling on thus far in the trip) to take a scenic route. These roads were the kind you see in movies or in stereotypical road trip pictures with a car on a long, straight, desert road appearing to lead no-where. After about 30 minutes we saw a sign for the town of Cisco. We couldn’t imagine what town would possibly be in the middle of this baron desert land of which seeing a passing car was a surprise. As we approached we quickly found out. Cisco had one general store with an American flag sticking straight up out of it. Around this general store was essentially a junkyard. Random cars and vehicles that had obviously been destroyed in accidents; old rundown buildings; rusty scrap metal; the town of Cisco had everything that could be deemed worthless in the world in one vast field. It was the type of place you could disappear and no one would ever be able to find out about it. On this we took the obligatory pictures of weird Mid-West passing through attractions and got the heck out.
We wound around a river into the park with plans of camping for the night. As the sun began to fall we anxiously entered nearly a dozen national park campgrounds. As the sun continued to fall deeper we more anxiously left nearly a dozen national park campgrounds finding them all to be full with Memorial Day weekend vacationers in search of the same natural wonders. The decision was to either move forward and leave the arches left unseen, or do the unthinkable.
Yes…at this point we decided to find a parking lot, suck it up in the name of some natural rock formations, and check into Hotel Jetta once again. We were all set up in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, only to discover it was next to a leach field. Now this wasn’t a word I’d previously known, but probably could’ve guessed based on the ferocious scent protruding from the ditch next to the hotel parking lot. For those of you that don’t know a leach field is where the septic tanks run into. Once again dumbfounded in the ridiculousness of the situation, and in a mixture of laughter and self-contempt, we moved to another parking lot across the street and a safe shot away from any uncanny smells.
The impromptu drying rack that has developed in the back of the Hotel Jetta.
Me, Megan, Lisl, and Dan hiking part of Sopris Mountain in Colorado.
Cisco
One of the many beautiful views on the drive into Moab.
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