Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Starting mileage: 18220, Distance travelled: 272, Miles hiked: 4

We had a lovely day hanging out with Jeff’s family. They fed us extremely well and we felt very much at home. After a leisurely breakfast, we drove to Lory State Park to hike to Arthur’s Rock, a 3.2-mile round trip with about 1000 feet of elevation. Rachel had to work and Naomi had camp in the morning so it was just Jeff, Lev, and Delta (their adorable rescue pup) with us. A wildfire had recently started on Alexander Mountain, about 20 miles away. On the way up, it was clear that we wouldn’t get a full view of the snow-capped mountains in the distance due to the smoke. We still had a wonderful view of the giant Horsetooth Reservoir below. About halfway down, the smoke thickened enough that we could smell and taste it in the air.

We headed back to Jeff’s house for some downtime. Since Brady missed out on the game store in Grand Junction on Sunday, we looked for one in Fort Collins and found several to choose from. Naomi recommended one and accompanied David, Laura and Brady there mid-afternoon. They came back with new purchases and were happy with the store. After a game of Clue and another delicious dinner, David convinced us to get a jump start on our long trip home. We loaded up the van and managed to carve three and a half hours and upwards of 200 miles off the total distance. That got us to a hotel just after midnight with the time change crossing into Nebraska. All attempts to capture the state line failed in the dark. One silver lining of the wildfire smoke was a spectacular sunset that followed us out of Colorado. There were a number of critters along the first stretch of our journey, including a near miss with a bunch of deer on both sides of the road, a bird strike (owl?) above our windshield, and several hundred murdered bugs, large and small.