August 1 - The Black Canyon of the Gunnison

This is one of those days in which I'm sure much happened, and yet I have a hard time distilling anything into a narrative. I suppose that means that it went by relatively happily and there were no major shakeups, but it doesn't make for very good reading.

We awoke at Crawford State Park this morning, the sun beating mercilessly at our tent and warming us to the point where we abandoned hope of sleeping in any longer. Usually, this is how we decide when to wake up and exit the tent, when the sweat inside the sleeping bag becomes too intolerable and we burst through the tent doors into the cool embrace of the morning air. This makes me think that:

1) we could wake up earlier and avoid this unpleasantness if we went to sleep a little earlier in the day, and,

2) we really ought to take advantage of the next town large enough to have a Wal-Mart and buy one of those little foam-bladed battery powered fans, our disaffection for Wal-Mart be damned.

While we had quite a lightning show the night before, we hung our damp laundry on the wire cage around the young trees in our camping area in hopes that the weather would change for the better and the clothes would dry by the time we finished breakfast. They did, and we packed freshly washed laundry (done in the bathroom sink with castile soap) into our bags as planned. The sun is a miraculous ball of incandescent gas.

We spent most of the day on Colorado's highway 92 climbing to the rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. When said with a pirate's inflection, the words are a joy to the ear. This canyon sits unassumingly in the southwestern part of the state, and yet its steep slopes are some of the most beautiful things we have seen in recent memory. Rock walls descend into the greenish water at the canyon floor, flanked by lush green cliff-dwelling vegetation that gives it a velveteen appearance. We spent quite a bit of time climbing to the north side of the canyon rim, but then enjoyed countless twists and turns down to the bridge across one of the dams on the river. My momentum was such that I nearly missed the turn over the water!

We waited for the typical rocky mountain afternoon thundershower to pass at a campground, and then began retracing our journey along the canyon's south side. We climbed quite a bit, and then another glorious descent towards lower elevations blessed us with a reprieve from exertion and a cool breeze to dry our sweat-soaked clothing.

We arrived in our target ending point of Cimarron to discover several closed businesses and a car graveyard to rival any city's junkyard. Disappointed, we reconciled ourselves to cold and uninteresting food at our campsite that night, but then hope shone in the appearance of a legacy business a few hundred feet ahead; its sign boasted that it had been in business since 1940. The grey old man inside appeared to be the person who had started the business those many years ago, assisted by someone I assume was his son and a quiet dog. The old man rang up our purchases but accidentally charged me 30 dollars more on the credit slip than we had rung up on his till. The son came to the rescue and corrected the paperwork, and I thanked him for being in business.

We camp tonight at a National Park Service campground for which we paid only twelve dollars, our cheapest official camping for quite some time. Planning to stash some panniers in the bathrooms since there are warnings against bears and yet no steel boxes for tenters to store their belongings in. We hope to reclaim them undamaged in the morning when we emerge, sweating and groggy, from our bear wonton of a tent.

Tonight, I'm staying up to watch more of the lightning show.