Saturday, 5 through Monday, 7 September 2020
I spent the entire day on Saturday figuring out a route for seeing at least some of what I'd like to see in Colorado and places I can stay along the way. That turned out to be a whole lot harder than I expected because apparently Coloradans are a very outdoorsy bunch - many state campgrounds as well as many KOAs are booked nearly solid on weekends. I'd have thought folks'd get it out of their systems with the Labor Day weekend but obviously not.
Plus I wanted to avoid CO's 4 wildfires and their smoke plumes as much as possible. The fires near Denver aren't much contained yet - in fact, one grew exponentially on Sunday - and a friend of David & Anna's who lives near Colorado Springs (not far south of Denver) told them the smoke in his area is fairly serious. With my asthma, I don't much want to go somewhere to aggravate the breathing problem. This wasn't something I expected to find when I decided to spend September in Colorado. I thought the wildfire problem was mostly on the West Coast, which goes to show how wrong I can be when I put my mind to it.
Plus plus I heard the news reports of 200 campers in CA's Sierra Nevadas having to be airlifted out of the campground where they'd been trapped by wildfires. I started thinking about what if we got trapped like that. How could I possibly get them to airlift not just me but also my excitable Dexter and my terrified-by-everything Gracie, not to mention Lily in her carrier. I've got a reasonably good imagination but I was having real problems trying to imagine that scenario. Clearly the best thing to do is avoid that possibility in the first place. It's just that that's a little tough when I'm only going to be in CO for this one month. The only way to completely avoid it is stay over here in the east, but I've already seen OK's version of the High Plains, and at some point I'll see Kansas's and Nebraska's version of the Great Plains, so I don't figure I need to spend my month here seeing Colorado's. I came for Estes Park and Denver and some of these places I've always heard about but never seen.
Anyway, what I ended up deciding to do is head along the southern part of the state over to the Four Corners region, to Hovenweep National Monument where there are ruins of 6 prehistoric pueblo sites. I didn't figure I'd be doing any hiking over there, but there's a visitor center with exhibits I can visit.
From there my plan is to head northeast into the mountains, and then up to Grand Junction. There're fires burning in both those areas but they're more than 85% contained right now, so I'm hoping they'll be pretty much under control when I get there. That fire near Grand Junction, by the way, is the largest in Colorado state history. From there, I'll be heading generally back over to the Royal Gorge, and then up to the Denver area.
Because I kept finding full campgrounds on weekends, I had to figure out a weird route to accommodate the timing problem. And in the middle of all that I realized these mountains are a whole lot taller than those I got comfortable with in West Virginia. And since I don't know yet what Colorado's roads are like and whether they've got it figured out as well as WV does how to drive in their mountains, I got cold feet and chopped out a whole stretch of the route I'd been contemplating.
And by the time I got all that figured out, it was late in the afternoon, so I quickly reserved campsites up till Sept. 21st, except for not having figured out a place to go for the first night after I've left here. Really incredible that all that took a full day, but it did.
I've noticed the doves in this campground have a different sound than the doves I'm used to so I finally looked them up. They're called Eurasian Collared Doves and are apparently the most wide-spread of any doves in the US.
One of the other campers here has this on his wheel cover.
Yeah, he has a Texas license plate.
Monday afternoon I noticed the police were here at the campground for quite a while. I saw them interviewing several people, including one of the employees, and then saw one of the interviewees being asked to sign a form. The body language of everybody was incredibly clear and I could tell from a distance that this guy really didn't want to sign the form and the cops were trying to explain it just said he acknowledged he was getting a copy, not that he agreed with it. I've had that same conversation with clients a whole lot of times and I know it by heart.
So later, nosy thing that I am, I asked at the office and they told me they often provide a public service to local folks by letting them use the showers here, for a small price. But lately one particular person had had arguments with some of the regular guests and had actually caused physical damage to one of the showers. The KOA had reported it to the cops and today, when this guy had the nerve to come back to take a shower, the KOA told the cops he was here again and they came to check things out. That's what all the interviewing was about. At the KOA's request, the police trespassed the guy from here, which is why he didn't want to accept that form. Life's always interesting.
We've set a record today for 50 days of 90° or higher in one year. The previous high was 48 days. Something to be scoffed at in states farther south, but the weather folks also reported it got up to 108° here in La Junta yesterday, which I don't regard as a laughing matter. My AC was on all day long.
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