Jun 24 – To Colorado National Monument

Today we moved about 100 miles northwest to the city of Fruita, Colorado. We are staying in another state park but the real purpose is to visit the Colorado National Monument. We will be here for 5 nights but will take at least one or two days off.

In hindsight I made a scheduling mistake by coming here now. I thought “It’s in Colorado, which means mountains to me so the weather should be good”. Nope. We dropped down 2000 feet from Ouray and we are back to wide open desert country. The highs for this week are around 35C and the lows around 18C. You just cannot stay outside very long.

We are only a couple of hours drive north east of Moab. We should have come here either before or after our stay there.

Our campground is very nice, with widely space sites. There is just not a lot of shade. Today, with both air conditioners running we can only get it down to around 28C inside the RV. I should have picked a site on the other side of the road so that the back end faces into the afternoon sun.

You can see the edge of the monument in the distance.

The monument follows a seismic fault line which has created a picturesque steep edge to the Colorado Plateau. After we were setup we headed up to the visitor’s center that is on top of the plateau.

It is a very windy road to get up there. We stopped at all the viewpoints along the way.

The view back towards Fruita and our campground.

Closer.

And our RV (not a cropped picture).

 

From the corner in the picture above you can look up to yet another balanced rock.

 

A close up of the rock in the picture above. The fault line runs right along it. The narrow row of fins along the top made it look like a sleeping lizard or dinosaur.

The Rim Road runs 23 miles from the north to the south end of the monument. We just did the 4 miles into the visitor’s center. We asked some questions about hiking, watched a movie and then headed back home to hide in the air conditioning. Nobody sits outside at this campground.

We will have to see how early we can drag ourselves out of bed, for any hikes we do, to try and beat the heat.