Fall camping

Summer has lingered here, long past the equinox. Although the nights are cooling off more now than they were in August, the days have still been sunny and hot. Perfect weather for camping, so over the weekend we headed up to the Uncompahgre Plateau. Just 45 miles from our house, we found ourselves on a dusty dirt road surrounded by ponderosa pines and golden aspen and brilliant blue sky.


Once we found a good campsite, we set up our tent and then ate lunch. Then we took a short bike ride, Chris pulling Cailan on the trail-a-bike, to the end of the road. The view from here was immense and yet intricate: layers on layers of canyons, cliffs, towers, and broad flat mesas, all leading up to the peaks of the La Sal mountains in Utah.


Cailan was unimpressed by the scenery but found the texture of the dirt to be extremely well suited to finger painting.


On the way back down to the campsite, we stopped at a pond where we discovered some “wild” life. Utah’s herding instincts seemed to rise up from some hidden corner of his brain, spurring him to bound away and give these cows what for.


I’m trying to get ready to run a 10K in December, and today was a “run day” on my training plan, so once we got back to the truck I swapped bike shoes for sneakers and headed back up the road. At 4500 feet higher than Grand Junction, and going steadily uphill, it might be more accurately described as a crawl instead of a run, but I survived my scheduled miles. After that it was Chris’s turn to take a more challenging bike ride. Cailan played in the tent with dinosaurs while I recovered, and then we went on a “colorful leaf hunt”.


If you asked me to find the most beautiful aspen leaf, I would look on the ground for a leaf with the classic heart shape, with a deep golden color unblemished from edge to edge. Cailan had a different take on what makes a leaf beautiful. He was drawn to leaves with patterns, that were brown along the edges or yellow spotted with brown. He named them for their patterns: Cheetah, Ocelot Ray, Tiger, Swallowtail, Edges, Half-n-half. Leaves that were all brown he described as looking like pictures from an I Spy book. If he found a twig on the ground with a few leaves still clinging to it, he called it a balloon stick. He picked up each leaf that caught his eye and handed it to me, saying “Look at this beautiful leaf!”

We were still on our leaf hunt when Utah and Chris returned, bouncing and sweaty, respectively. My hands were stuffed with beautiful leaves and balloon sticks, and Cailan kept bringing me more and more. He apparently didn’t need to hang on to them long term; I set them down in a careful pile near our tent so we could find them again if we needed to, but he didn’t ask for the ones he had gathered before – he was all catch and release that day.


Chris and Utah had a nice, 11-mile ride on rocky dirt road and singletrack trail. The trail had been mostly downhill, with a return on road, including a mile-long section that was unmercifully steep and strewn with rocks:


Other sections of the road were smoother and easier to travel, leaving a bit of energy to enjoy the scenery.


We made a quick dinner (angel hair pasta with olive oil, herbs and cheese) and then scrambled through the aspen towards the west, to get a good view of the sunset. It wasn’t quite as magnificent as the view at the end of the road, but it was pretty good.




We crawled into the tent with the last bit of light fading from the sky and introduced Cailan to the grand camping tradition of playing cards in the tent until bedtime. It was Cailan’s first time playing Crazy Eights and he found it tremendous fun – I think he would have played until midnight if we hadn’t cut him off and tucked him into his sleeping bag.