Day 4: Across the Great Divide

The sun rose bright over the city of Denver where we woke on this, our fourth day of travelling. It seems much longer than that, to us, with so much distance and so many places flashing by at highway speeds.

Today, we crossed the Continental Divide, and descended through the Vail Pass into what I feel we may safely call the West proper. It would be difficult to find words to accurately convey the beauty of the mountains and deserts we crossed in our travels through Colorado and Utah, so I will leave that task to the pictures below.

This region has a surprising number of blindingly simple names for its towns. Boulder. Rifle. Gypsum. Basalt. Bluff. It's as though someone was going through their kit bag as they rode through the region, and tossed them out haphazardly left and right. Michael has taken to calling this phenomenon the "Colorado Naming Convention".

Our journey ended up in Moab, UT. Moab is an incongruous little town of about 4000 inhabitants, half an hour's drive from Interstate 70 in the bleak deserts of eastern Utah. If you are a tourist, Moab is a great place to go, because there are lots of places to stay, and the town is immediately adjacent to many fascinating natural sandstone formations. However, both David and Michael concluded that it would be a terrible place to have to live on anything resembling a permanent basis.

We upload these pages by dialing in to America Online, using whatever local access point happens to be convenient to where we are. In this particular case, I'm loading the pictures for Day 2 from the comfort of my bed in Denver.

No, I'm not posing, it's just a weird angle.

High above in the Rockies, we stopped at one of those little scenic areas by the side of the road, which had some nice views all around. A little stone building containing rest rooms was built beside the parking lot.

It seems they take their vending machines pretty seriously here in Colorado. These are locked up inside some strong, steel cages. I suppose maybe those Rocky Mountain chipmunks might get pretty aggressive sometimes.

We took a walk up the side of the adjacent hillside. At almost eleven thousand feet, we could definitely feel the characteristic light-headedness of high altitude. We took our time to avoid falling over.

We hiked up beside the little brook, toward the trees you can see behind us.

There was some evidence that a good, hard forest fire had come through this area within the past 50 years or so, not least of which was the dry and charred stump of a tall tree.

Fires notwithstanding, the trees stood tall and proud against the lovely blue sky.

Looking back toward the parking lot, we got a great view of the mountains rising up beside the road.

The plants of the mountains are hardier than those of the valleys below. These lovely flowers stand atop stout low-growing stalks, open eagerly to the warm sun.

Following the trail of David's trusty GPS, we continue our drive through the mountains.

Unlike the more mature and gentle curvature of the White Mountains that surround our home, the steep angles and deep vales of the Rockies are more reminiscent of the Alps than anything else.

As we descended down into the valleys on the far side of Rifle, the road hugged tightly to the steep stone walls on either side.

At various intervals along the descent, we passed by these "Runaway Truck" ramps. We weren't sure whether to take this as a good or a bad sign. Some of them do seem to have been used (or at least there were tracks in the gravel).

Eventually, the ground leveled out, and the mountains fell behind in the distance.

The land grew drier and more level as we descended out of the west of Colorado toward the desert reaches of Utah.

The desert opens up before us...

Off in the distance, the flat tops of the mesas are reminiscent of mountains with bad haircuts.

Here we stand, looking out over the parched and alien landscape of the eastern Utah desert. Small lizards skittered across the dusty ground.

Michael sits at the edge of a rock, contemplating a narrow gash in the desert, which provides the only shade to be found in this vast plain.