Colorado Trip Post #7

Yes, I am still referring to the trip we took in August of 2013. My obsessive tendencies will not allow me to skip the three month chunk of time between then and now and just continue. 

We had the rented Jeep for another day until 5:00pm so we decided to take the entire road to Cathedral drive, starting very early in the morning. The first leg of the drive was along a beautiful creek and Alan was having difficult physically keeping himself in the Jeep. So, he stopped a few times and he would run down to an area that looked good and fish for a few minutes, get back in the Jeep and repeat.

Showing us his pretty trout.

Freaking cute backseat riders.

We only saw about two other vehicles on the road that entire morning. It is a breathtaking drive that winds in and out of the base of rocky canyons that meet expansive valley meadows. 

It warmed up so the boys ran around and followed Alan on this fishing stop.

Adam was picking flowers.

The road we were on meets up with Deer Lakes on the far southern end, so we stopped there to eat our lunch and watch Alan fish. The mountain sun was intense and there is little cover around that area, so we didn't stay too long. 

Alan is in the center of this photo.

We turned south on highway 149 toward Creede in search of the Continental Reservoir. Five or six miles down a fairly docile dirt road, then up a quick mountainous pass, we found the reservoir, a low level lake with a boat ramp and greenish water. The banks were somewhat inaccessible and steep. We just looked for a moment and turned back around. Alan wanted to go down to the creek by the road coming in.

We stopped at a pooled area, from a beaver dam and the boys got out and ran around. 

The sun was still harsh but the air temperature was quite cool. It was one of those days where you sweat in the sun and get cold in the shade. The area we stopped at was a free graze cow pasture so it smelled of cow, had lots of the flies associated with cows, and there were “land mines” everywhere. The medium sized boulders instantly became the source of pretend play for the boys. Aaron was a “mountain goat” and he called Adam “his baby mountain goat,” and they went up and down this miniature mountain and were quite pleased with themselves. 

Happy dancing.

Baby mountain goat.

Alan didn't have much luck in the mucky cow water, so we moved on again. We drove back to the highway and crossed straight over to a dirt road, parking area that had a sign, which read, “Crystal Lake – 9 ½ miles.” We had some time to kill before needing to return the Jeep, so we thought we would check it out. Before the road even began we had to cross a large creek, which should have been a sign of what was to come. The road alternated between being smooth and incredibly rough. The majority of the drive was through the middle of beetle-kill pine forests with aspens scattered around and lots of grasses and flowers on the forest floor. 

Entering the creepy beetle-kill forest 

It didn’t look like Colorado; it looked more like east Texas. Every now and then we would emerge from the forest and look out onto a huge expanse of fields speckled with little pine trees and bushes. It was pretty neat, yet another view of the mountains that we had not yet seen.

There was rain in our future.

The road continued on and on, way past the nine-mile mark and we had now been driving for more than an hour. Aaron said he needed to go poop, so we found a place to pull over and attempted to make a rock-potty for him but he could not relax enough to take care of business. And naturally Adam, mister monkey-see-monkey-do had to try, but was also to no avail. They tend to be rather picky these days on where they do their serious work, and they just might not be to the point of mastering outdoor relief experience.

(Don't pretend like you haven't documented such things too.)

Pretty flower in the creepy forest.

So, we turned back the way we came and started working our way down the mountain again. The boys were both eerily quiet, abnormally quiet, on the way down. Alan kept asking Aaron if he was okay, thinking it had something to do with not relieving himself, but Aaron kept saying he was okay. It was about five minutes further down the bumpy forest road when out of silence, Aaron nonchalantly said, “I threw up.” Alan immediately pulls over the Jeep and I jump out in the light rain and carefully started taking the clothing layers off Aaron and eventually lifted him out of the Jeep and on to the side of the dirt road. It was there that I stripped him to his undies and changed his clothes. With boys, I always travel with a spare set of clothes, but I was thinking along the lines of muddy or soaked, not puke. I felt so bad for him; he was fighting back tears and apologizing. I just kept telling him he is okay and not to worry. I was working as fast as I could because we were short on time and standing in the cold rain – and one of us didn't have any clothes on.

We had one more false alarm on the way down and when we got down to the bottom I washed out Alan’s pasta bowl in the creek and gave it to Aaron for a puke-container. The roads back to Lake City are quite bendy and judging by his level of instability, he was not out of the woods with his motion sickness. Sure enough, with no notice, he threw up again about halfway down Slumgullion Pass. I got out and rinsed the bowl and tended to him and we were off again.

Poor guy. He managed to make it back to Lake City without any more problems. While we were refueling the Jeep, Adam looked over at him and very sweetly asked, “Are you feeling better?” He said yes and really from then on out he was back to normal, if not a little extra crazy to makeup for lost time. 

Once we turned in the Jeep we celebrated making it through the dramatic day and the end of another wonderful trip to Lake City with dinner at the Packer Saloon.  

Here's a few clips from the day... The boys singing "I've Got A Woman," while we pass time, one of the fishing stops, and then a brief documentation of the beetle-kill forest road....