Colorado - Day 14 - to Grand Junction and the Colorado National Monument

Grand Junction KOA, Grand Junction                                                      Monday, 14 September 2020

At the entrance to Iron Creek Campground, which is one of 2 campgrounds in Crawford State Park and the one I'd been staying in, I saw a sign saying it had been developed "under a cooperative agreement between the US Bureau of Reclamation and Colorado Department of Natural Resources."  Not a partnership I've heard of before.

On our way out of the campground, I stopped to walk the dogs at a nearby boat launch and was stunned at the degree to which it was impossible to launch a boat there.

I shot 2 videos of the lake that's not a lake any more, but only a pond, and neither one of them is willing to upload.  I'll keep working at it, though, because this isn't the last time I'll want to shoot a video of something.  In the meantime, I'm irritated at having to come up with the 1,000 words those pictures are worth.

UPDATE: I may have stumbled on the process to insert them but will leave in my verbal description just in case this doesn't work.  The 1st video looks like I'm showing the mountains when I'm actually starting with the far right-hand side of where the lake should be.  The 2nd video basically continues from the first, except I took it from the boat launch area, which you can see would make for an interesting launch.

When I asked at the park office about the very low lake level, they explained this lake was created to store irrigation water, and generally from April to June there's plenty of water for recreational purposes.  But this year the drought has been more serious than usual, so farmers are needing more water than usual to irrigate the grass their cows need, because Nature by itself isn't providing enough precipitation to keep it growing.  This Is Beef Country, after all.

The office also told me this area is considered High Desert, which I have no trouble believing, given the scrubland I've been mostly driving through when I haven't been on a mountain.

On the road                                                                                           In the nearby town of Crawford, pop. just over 400, I saw flags both for Trump and for Biden.  That's the first Biden flag I've seen and one of the only Biden signs I've seen anywhere.  And as far as I can tell, this is a 2-party state.  It seems to be the usual rural vs urban divide regarding conservative vs liberal, and the vast majority of the population lives in major cities, but maybe the Republican candidates here are more middle-of-the-road than we often find in Texas Republicans, because a lot of them get elected.  After all, Cory Gardiner (R) is one of CO's 2 US senators.

I saw more long-haired cows, this time most of them all white.  It's a bit of a jolt to see them in a field, cows not usually being known for having a lot of hair.

The town of Hotchkiss, 1,200' lower in elevation than Crawford, is the "Friendliest Town Around."  Nice slogan, though there's not a lot of competition in this area.  Hotchkiss has a National Fish Hatchery, currently producing Rainbow Trout for western CO and northern NM.

I passed apple orchards and vineyards and a winery.

I passed the turn-off for the tiny town of Austin, which has a post office but Wikipedia doesn't say whether it has a population.  What it does have nearby is the Ferganchick Orchard Rock Art Site, which sounds like something from the 1970s to me.  But it's actually talking about ancient rock drawings made first by Archaic people, and later by the Utes who lived here.  I found almost nothing about it online, but there's one sample of the art at this link.   https://www.historycolorado.org/rock-art-site

I passed several farms, one with a wide variety of veggies and trees growing in small fields side by side, followed by a large cornfield.  And I passed another large tree farm.  I think Christmas trees must be a big product around here.

In Delta (founded 1914, they say), elevation 4,953', I switched back to US 50 for the drive into Grand Junction.

Diesel costs substantially less than unleaded in CO.  I've been told this is reasonable since it goes through less refining, but this is the only state I've ever seen where the price is lower statewide.  Gas prices in general are considerably higher here, due to higher gas tax, so it was a jolt coming here from Oklahoma, a more oil-friendly state.

There's lots of corn grown in the Delta area, and sheep and cows for variety.

The scenery on this part of the trip was really different from what I've seen before.

on the east side of the road

on the west side of the road

farther along the east side

I saw a vehicle with a Washington state license plate and a bumper sticker that said:                         Human  kind                                                                                                 Be both

[Have I said emphatically enough how much I hate this new alleged interface that doesn't "interface" anything but instead imposes unreasonable and unstated conditions on me, the user?]

Grand Junction                                                                                          Grand Junction provides its own sign of welcome, saying it has an elevation of 4,600' and a population of 65,000.  (I keep mentioning the elevation because to those who don't live here, it matters.  By comparison, the elevation of Dallas is 450'-550'.  Yes, I have asthma, but I haven't been forced to notice it much before coming to Colorado.  Here, I can feel my energy level being diminished noticeably by lack of oxygen at higher elevations.)

Whoever platted this town originally must have laid it out in hectares or something.  Driving into town I came to the following streets: 30 Road, 29¾ Road, 29½ Road, 29¼ Road, 28 Road - you get the picture.  The point is that each of these roads is quite a distance from the next one so it's not like they're as close together as ordinary city streets, because they're more like as close together as 5 or 6 city streets.

After I checked into the KOA and we had some lunch and a walk, I went into the main part of town.  I was 3,000 miles past when I should have changed my oil and was starting to get really worried about it.  It's a nuisance being restricted to the places that not only have doors higher than 11' but also both doors and a driveway wide enough to accommodate our length and width, but I found one here at a Valvoline place.

From there I got lost (because the streets weren't labeled the way Google said they'd be) and wandered around a little, found a very nice and very active park, and got found again.  I was on my way to the Colorado National Monument that can be accessed at its north end in the town of Fruita, north of Grand Junction.  I'd never heard of this place before, but the KOA brochure assumed visitors wanted to see it, so I figured I might as well.  Now that I have, I'll know to budget more time for it on the next trip.

As far as I can tell, this area was created a national monument by Pres. Taft (who had actually visited it) in 1911 when an attempt to get it made a national park ran into congressional maneuvering.  Locals and the congressional delegation have been trying for the ensuing 100+ years to get the national park designation, so far unsuccessfully.  And the main reason there's a focus on it is because it's very old, geologically, and stunningly beautiful.

I'd already passed up the turning onto the park road before I saw the scenery I'd be missing.  The road I was on - State Route 340, aka Broadway - roughly parallels the Colorado River and is barely 2 lanes wide.  To take these photos, I pulled out into the areas the mail carrier uses to deliver mail to the mail boxes, because there was no other space at all where I could stop.  This is barely a sample of the amazing scenery.

further on I got a better angle
on that formation above right 

From there on, the area got more heavily populated as I got closer to Grand Junction.  Many of the houses in this area were definitely on the ritzy side - they must have cost a bundle to build, and I'm guessing they've got a substantial wintertime bill for heating and plowing the driveway.

Still on this road I came to F½ Road, which I would have thought was pushing it a bit, except I know Corpus Christi has a P½ Street.  But then came 21⅛ Road, which definitely is pushing it.

Grand Junction is home to Colorado Mesa University, a public college with an enrollment just under 10,000.  In some ways, Grand Junction felt like a college town, given the large numbers of young people I saw at various activities around town.

One of those places was the Western Colorado Botanical Garden, where we stopped so the dogs could walk a bit before going back to the campground.  The garden itself was closed due to the virus (per their sign, though I'm not sure why that'd be a problem with the outdoors setting), but outside the gate was a stopping point for a trail that wound for miles to various spots around town - including the college.  So, yeah, lots of students.

Though I really hadn't driven all that many miles today, I'd still been driving for hours and was pretty tired by the time we got back to the campground.  The KOA, by the way, had a sign posted outside on the road that said there were no vacancies in the campground.  I can hardly wait for cooler weather when fewer people will be tempted to go camping - makes it easier for me to walk the dogs.