Colorado National Parks
September 24-30, 2006
Colorado State University hosts a number of Elderhostel activities. This was one such. It was assortedly advertised as being "a National Parks tour" or a "Geology tour". It ended up being some of the above, some things "not advertised", but definitely interesting.
The beginning of the trip is pretty standard. Got up early, drove to airport, got through security with no major hassles, flew to Minneapolis, had breakfast, sat around and read, got some pop, read some more (yes, the MPS wait exceeded 3 hours).
| We flew direct to Colorado Springs. This is the view
of Pike's Peak we were greeted by. No, the white on top is not a
cloud, they got 8" of snow in the valley last week. We had a long cab ride to the motel, but were greeted there by an even better view. |
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Monday morning our tour began with a visit to the Air Force Academy.
Because of 9-11 security, most of the base is closed to us, but we were
allowed a visit to the chapel. There actually are 4 chapels, one for
protestants (seats 1200, view on the left), one for Roman Catholics (seats
600), one for Jews (sets 100) and one "multifaith room").
The walk from the visitor's center is about 1/3 of a mile, but through pretty much virgin Colorado hills, so an interesting introduction to the local flora. (As mentioned before, this had little to do with either geology or National Parks) |
| We had lunch at the Garden of the Gods visitors center, then after lunch
took a bus tour through the garden. Being in a bus, we were limited
about where we could stop, but did catch this good picture. We did get a Geology lecture here . Current Conventional Wisdom is that this area has been under water 3 times. Rockies #1 was eroded away, then came Rockies #2 which again was submerged and the current Rockies finally came up. What you see here are the remnants of the Igneous rock from Rockies #2. |
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| One of the highlights of the Garden is Balancing Rock. Others on
the bus noted that there has been concrete reinforcement inserted
underneath, so it really now is a tripod supported rock. We saw another of these in the Colorado National Monument.
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We ended the day at the Olympic Training Village in downtown Colorado Springs. Just a nice place for a break. In addition to a nice bunch of displays about Olympic competition, they had this pretty pond. |
| Tuesday was primarily a travel day. We had to get from Colorado Springs to Durango. So we headed South, then headed West. Because of the snow they had last week, the trees and bushes were in full Colorado color. You don't get the really bright reds that we're used to in the east, but you do get a very pretty mixture of pastels. |
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The highlight of the trip was the Sand Dunes of Southern Colorado (San Luis Valley). You thought all the desert was west of here didn't you. It's a unique combination of prevailing South Westerly winds meeting the Northerly winds on the other side of the mountains. The result is a dune collection 650' high, 3 miles across and 7 miles long. You can see the dunes in the foreground, and the background is the nearest "fourteener" (Colorado has 52 mountains more than 14,000' high). |
| We ended the trip into Durango with a trip over Fox Creek pass. On the way down, we stopped for this view of the village of Paragosa. |
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