Taking it Easy in Telluride and Montrose

Colorado Travelog #26
Montrose, CO - Wednesday, 6 Jul 2022, 10pm

This evening we're in Montrose, Colorado, holing up at a Holiday Inn Express. There's not much to say about Montrose.... It's a crossroads town in western Colorado... with a Holiday Inn Express. 🤣

After finishing our hike to Bear Creek Falls this afternoon we grabbed a late lunch in Telluride. We were too tired and hungry to plan much else so we went to literally the closest restaurant, a brew-pub 1½ blocks from the end of the trail. It was pretty good. I had a chimichurri steak with a small sampler of beer then a pint of the beer I liked best. The beers were surprisingly high in alcohol content, like 8-9%. I passed the car keys to Hawk after 2 pints.

While we were dining the sky, which had been gray off and on for much the day, opened up and began pouring rain. We had chosen to dine on the patio, as the weather was nice outside until then. For a few minutes we huddled together under the patio umbrellas. Then we determined the rain wasn't going to let up so we asked to be seated inside. We were the last of at least half a dozen groups who braved the weather outside.

The drive from Telluride to Montrose was barely 70 miles and took about an hour and a half. It seemed like it took 2 hours, though. I blame the rain for slowing things down.

On our way around 14,000 ' Mt. Sniffles, crossing over the Dallas Pass at about 9,000', we saw snow on the road side. It didn't snow on us (temps never dropped below 46° F / 8° C according to our truck's air thermometer) but snow had fallen at that level not too much earlier in the day. And Mt. Sniffles was streaked with snow in all of its crevices. I don't know why Coloradans gave this 14,000 ' mountain a lame name like Sniffles. With its broad shoulders and angular crown, a mountain like that in, say, the Trinity Alps of California would be named Odin's Throne or Mt. Storm King. But here it's Mt. Sniffles.

The weather cleared up this afternoon in Montrose. It probably kept raining in the high mountains around Telluride, but here in Montrose we're in terrain more closely matching high desert. We soaked for a while in the hot tub before going back out to rustle up some dinner. Montrose being... well, basically nowhere... stuff was closing down at 8. We ended up going through a McDonald's drive thru (they closed the dining room at 8 but ran the drive through later) and eating our food on a picnic table in front of the restaurant at dusk.

Back here at the room, now, we're taking it easy for the rest of the evening. I'm catching up a bit on my blog backlog, and Hawk is doing some work. Ugh. I'm glad my time off from work is actually time off from work.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day. We'll do a bunch of short hikes at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, which is about 30 minutes from here, then drive on to Glenwood Springs a few hours away. It'll be a full day.

Update: I forgot to mention we scored a big suite upgrade at the hotel due to my Platinum Elite status. See a walkthrough of the "suite" life in my next blog.

Enjoying the Suite Life as a Platinum Elite

Colorado Travelog #27
Montrose, CO - Thursday, 7 Jul 2022, 7:30am

I forgot to mention in my post last night about relaxing in Montrose, CO that we're enjoying a suite here at the Holiday Inn Express. It's a complimentary upgrade I got as a Platinum elite in IHG's frequent guest program.

People often wonder what kinds of perks global traveler elites enjoy. Here's a perfect example of the kinds of upgrade we score, occasionally.

Watch on YouTube

Note a massive upgrade like this is not common. This is the biggest upgrade I've gotten at IHG in about 8 years!

We really enjoyed the extra space to stretch out and get our work done.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Colorado Travelog #28
Montrose, CO - Thursday, 7 Jul 2022, 12:15pm

Today we're visiting Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. It's a small park in remote western Colorado. We were here one time before, several years ago, but it was gloomy and drizzly that day. Today there's plenty of clear weather on tap here, so it's worth a return trip.

First we stopped at the visitors center around 9:30 and walked out to Gunnison Point. Here you get a sense of what Black Canyon of the Gunnison is about. It is a narrow, deep gorge; the steepest, deepest, narrowest gorge in North America. It's up to 2,250' (685 m) deep and, at some points, only tens of meters wide. The Grand Canyon is deeper, more than twice as deep at points, but it's also thousands of meters wide.



One thing you see in the above picture, BTW, is that the left (north) side of the canyon is much steeper than the right (south). This is a consequence of being in the northern hemisphere. In the winter, when the area receives most of its precipitation, the southern rim (facing north) is shaded by the low angle of the sun, while the northern rim (facing south) is exposed. The southern rim thus experiences a lot more ice formation, and the ice thawing and re-freezing breaks up the rocks. The sunnier, exposed northern rim gets very little ice thus much less erosion.

Our method this morning at the park has been mostly car touring. There are numerous short trails atop the cliffs. Every half mile or so there's another small pull-out on the side of the road with a trail of a few hundred meters. The only hiking alternative to skirting the top of the cliffs is to venture down into the gorge.... There are several marked trails for that, but they are incredibly steep and strenuous, entailing a near-vertical descent of 2,000' elevation and then a return of the same. That's way more than we're in shape for, so we're hopping out for multiple cliff-top trails.



I'm not sharing pictures of all the places we hopped out for short hikes. There are too many of them, and the pictures start to blur together after a while. I chose the second picture above because it's unique. This is Painted Wall. This is the deepest part of the canyon; that one rock face, with the light striations on it, is 2,250' tall. The main part of the wall is gneiss, a metamorphic rock formed upwards of 2 billion years ago. The striations are a much younger volcanic intrusion. They are mostly quartz (the 2nd most common mineral in the earth's crust) with some feldspar (the most common mineral in the earth's crust) and mica.

Again, in this picture you can see the steepness of the canyon. The scale may be hard to tell... that greenery that looks like bushes are full grown trees. In person standing atop cliffs like this and looking down is dizzying. The mind struggles to comprehend the sheer scale of what's below the feet.



The third and final picture I'm sharing here is Tomichi Point. Here again you can see the depth and steepness of the canyon, but also the presence of some of the side canyons. This is the most popular spot for descending to the river at the bottom of the canyon. By going down the side canyon it's only a 60° slope!