July 16 Black Canyon of Gunnison, Colorado

Tuesday, July 16

63 degrees this morning as we continue on our back road, now number 858.  There are signs warning about work delays, but we hit it right and barely pause.  We travel through more aspen and other forests,

 passing several pretty high meadow alpine lakes - Silver Lake, Beaver Lake (no beavers).  The Trek again has overheating issues due to long climbs, but as long as we stop for a bit to cool off, all is well.

These horses were lined up watching the road work!

We finally reach Highway 50 and head for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  We have been here once before but will visit some different areas this time.  Beautiful!  This is the greatest combination of depth, steepness and narrowness of any canyon in North America.  

 

This is called the Painted Wall - pegmatite stripes in gneiss.

The canyon is 48 miles long and 2,000' deep and grows deeper by about an inch in a century!  Mind boggling to think how long it took to get where it is today!  The Gunnison River has carved this marvel which was first explored in 1853.  In 1909 they drilled a huge tunnel 8' high by 10' wide through the canyon wall to divert water to farmers in the area. President Hoover created the National Park designation.

We decide to start heading east and south from here - back towards Texas.   We pass a beautiful campsite along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River and turn around to take a look at Gate Campground.  Only 5 sites and two are taken, but we choose site #2 which is far enough from the others that we can't see or hear them.  This is a Forest Service campground for which we pay a whopping $2.50. Greg cooks burgers on the grill tonight after doing a wash-up in the river!  He scrounged wood for a fire, but the mosquitos are too bad to spend a lot of time outside.