Day 2: Sunday
Yesterday was an episodic travel day with a lot of unique things, so there's no overall narrative. Just a handful of really high highlights.
Buffalo Bill Cody’s grave on top of Lookout Mountain
Irony: The fog/cloud cover was so think we could barely see 20 feet in front of us. Not much of a lookout. But it’s an impressive grave for one of those legendary American icons who seems to be fading into the mists of history. (Admit it—you had to stop for a minute and wonder if this was the Wild Bill Hickok of Deadwood fame.)
Loveland Pass
A high elevation mountain pass about an hour west of Denver. The 11,990-foot pass is a continental shelf positioned along the main continental divide of North America, separating waters flowing into the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. It’s a spectacular drive filled with snowy mountains, where skiers flock to descend both official and unofficial slopes. Fun fact: Not all snow is as shallow as it looks. I stepped onto what looked like a safe snowy patch, and I sank down two feet into a snow bank. The kids died laughing, and Kristy wasn’t quick enough to catch it on camera. I spent the next several hours with wet feet. Worth it.
Colorado National Monument
The Colorado National Monument is long stretch of rocky canyons that seem to be a blend of the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, and the Needles of South Dakota. It’s a surreal expanse of rock formations that look like they’re either from an old John Wayne movie or from another planet. Rocky layers occasionally give way to enormous smooth vertical surfaces with small pock-marked cavities where bats make their homes. We felt like we were in the middle of the chase scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But we also had a very energetic six year old boy with us, which is a pretty terrifying experience because you’re convinced he’s going to try to race off a cliff every time he gets out of the car. But the breathtaking views were worth the parental stress. The only real disappointment was that we never saw a desert bighorn sheep, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
Cisco
Cisco is tiny town in the middle of the desert soon after you cross into Utah from Colorado. It was founded in the 1880s as a water refilling station for steam locomotives passing through the region, and it eventually became a thriving town sustained by livestock, oil, and natural gas. But the decline of steam transport and the construction of I-70 essentially destroyed Cisco, and it became a ghost town. In 1993, a family bought 35 acres of land there, so the town’s official population is now 4. In 2015, Chicago artist Eileen Muza purchased most of the city and turned it into an experimental artist haven with art installations scattered across the desert landscape. It’s a weird, funky, delightfully freaky little town that’s worth wandering off the interstate to find. Bonus: We saw our first real wildlife here. A couple prairie dogs popped up out of their holes and scurried around, while a mother mule deer and her calf wandered near the road about a mile away.
The Cowboy Grill at Red Cliffs Lodge
The last thing we wanted to do when we reached Moab and dropped our stuff off at the hotel was drive some more. But I read some recommendations of a restaurant with a great view and they were able to squeeze us in with a last-minute reservation, so we piled back in the car and drove about 14 miles through the gorge along the Colorado River. We were pretty road-weary by this point, but the astonishing scenic expanse of red sandstone cliffs surrounding the river along the winding gorge was enough to ease the exhaustion. When we sat down at our table in the rustic Cowboy Grill at the Red Cliffs Lodge, most of the small tensions accumulated throughout the day kind of melted away. (The wine from the ranch's vineyard helped, too.) It’s impossible to adequately describe the experience or capture it with a picture, but the sunset dinner at a ranch beside the riverside cliffs was one of the few meals I think I'll always remember.
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