A day on the road...

On Sunday morning we rose early and went for a morning hike in the Mt. Zirkel wilderness area. It was a 7 mile roundtrip up to a beautiful alpine valley and lake (Three Island Lake). However, as you may notice in the pictures, almost half of the pine trees along our hike were dead. This is because for the past 10 years most of Colorado has had a problem with bark beetles, which eat the bark off of pine trees, eventually killing the trees. It used to be that the winters were long and cold enough to kill a decent amount of the bark beetles, so the trees and beetles had a healthy relationship. With global warming, more and more beetles live through the winter, and the forests just can not sustain the current beetle population. It’s all very depressing and motivating at the same time. I’m sure you all understand why it’s depressing, but it also motivates us to keep making additional adjustments to our lifestyles, to better serve our earth.

After the hike we headed northwest toward the Grand Tetons. As we drove through northwestern Colorado, we spotted a pronged-horn sitting on a bluff over looking the road, way cool. A little further down the road (in northeastern Utah) we noticed a big grey cloud rising up over the mountains ahead of us. We got a little closer and decided that it was a pretty large wild fire. We gawked at the huge smoke cloud for a while, but then passed it by, leaving the fire in our rearview mirror. It got to be around dinner time, and we decided that we should set up camp and cook some dinner. So, we stopped at a fairly deserted campground in the Flaming Gorges National Recreation Area. After being at the campground for about 10 minutes or so, I started to get a bad vibe, felt light headed and realized that I smelled smoke. Kimbal quickly identified that we were downwind of the wildfire. Well, that made me pretty uncomfortable, and Kimbal was starting to feel sick too, so we decided to pack up and press on towards the Tetons for a few more hours. When we left the Flaming Gorges valley, I looked back and could see the entire area just blanketed with smoke, yuck. The next day we heard that the wildfire was almost completely uncontained and on the move, so I’m pretty glad that we moved on.

The next few hours drive provided an absolutely spectacular sunset! Since we were driving west the sunset seemed to go on and on. We just couldn’t stop marveling at the natural beauty and wished that we knew something more about photography so that we could adequately capture it. We did our best anyway.

Long after dark we ended up finding a dependable KOA campground to spend the night, with smoke-free air and showers too. A good ending to a great day.