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Day Four: Gore Pass, Routte National Forest, CO → Antelope Flats Campground, Flaming Gorge NRA, UT (Map)
Total Miles Driven:
Total Hours Driven: 8
Total Miles Hiked: 2
Total Hours Hiked: 1
Kramer Quotient (KQ): 4

The day began before the sun came up, and believe me, this was not by choice. As I mentioned in my last entry, we camped fairly high up in a mountain pass in the Routte National Forest, and at our elevation it was very VERY cold at night. So cold, in fact, that it was hard to sleep. But the amazing thing for me about being out in the mountains like this is that I just don’t seem to need as much sleep when I’m here. Back home it takes me a good hour to wake up, even with a full night sleep and a large Dunkin coffee. But out here? Out here I only need a minute or two to wake up.

After scrambling for a minute or two to find some warmer clothing, Christian and I broke camp quickly and headed down out of the pass. Steamboat Springs was a bit less than an hour from our campsite, so we decided to head there to catch some breakfast. I’m writing this entry a few days late, so unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the place we ate, but…. $1.95 for homemade waffles topped with bananas foster? Are you kidding me? Good lord. Have I mentioned I love this place?

Filling up on more than our fair share of coffee, we hit the road towards Dinosaur National Monument, one of the parks in Colorado that neither of us had ever visited. It was a quick drive – just under 3 hours – and before we knew it we were hiking out to the end of an overlook over the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers. The rivers meet in a maze of canyons, and even from 1000 feet up we couldn’t tell where the two actually joined. Places like this really are amazing – they make you feel so small, so humble, and yet at the same time so alive and at peace. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I just have to find a way to make things like this a much more regular part of my life.

Dinosaur is actually a Park in multiple parts. Our hike was in the section where the canyons are the main focus, but further down the road and across the Utah border is the entrance that explains the Monument’s name. Contained within the westernmost portion of the park is a huge quarry filled with the fossilized bones of literally thousands of dinosaurs. Picture a building built into the side of the hill they are excavating and you’ll have some idea what I’m talking about.

Unfortunately, these pictures just don’t do the place justice. How are you supposed to capture in a photo the feeling of touching a partially excavated dinosaur bone with your own bare hands? You just can’t. But the feeling is in an odd way the same as looking out over the canyon: humbled and yet crackling with life.

We would have loved to stay there longer, but the quarry closed at 4:30pm, and we’d only arrived at 4:15. But on a trip like this forward motion is always the theme, so we hopped back in the car to head out…. Where?

We’d purposely decided to plan no further than one day ahead, and with this day, Dinosaur was as far as we got. We still had about 4 hours of daylight left, and after looking over a map, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area seemed like the perfect place to aim. A little over a year ago Christian and I, along with my sister, had spent a week in Moab, UT, and part of the trip was a day on the Colorado River in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. It had been one of the highlights of that trip, and although we knew nothing about Flaming Gorge, we suspected the two might be quite similar.

So off we went, making a drive through the mountains that was nothing short of awe inspiring, pulling in to camp to watch a sunset that was so beautiful I forgot to take pictures. Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’re going to spend a few hours boating on the lake before we head west towards Nevada, one step closer to SF.

Stay tuned…