Saturday's Back Road Trip

Saturday's Route

Close Up of the Switch backs on Burr Trail

Looking back a switchbacks after coming down.

The degree of upheaval in the area is impressive.

Got lucky and managed to get a couple of pictures to upload.  Be sure to click on them for the enlarged versions.

Yesterday we took a drive of about 150 miles, about 75 miles of which was on a back road that is little traveled.  About 40 miles of this road is just gravel although the sign at the beginning of the road, called Burr Trail, says it is 77 miles of unpaved twisty road not recommend for large vehicles or vehicles with trailers.  I think that scares a lot of people off.  The scenery was beautiful and the trip down the steep switchback shown above with exciting.  It is very steep and each switchback is a minimum of 180 degrees and some were actually more then that.  We were lucky in that we did not meet anyone coming up although we could have s l o w l e y passed each other if we had.  This route took us up through valleys and canyons that are at the heart of the "Water Pocket Fold" which is the main geological feature of this area.  It is described as a "wrinkle in the earth" and there were several places on this trip where we could actually see it.  The frustration in trying to share pictures of it here is that it is so big it is hard to capture in a picture.  There is rarely anything to give the photo some scale.  As you can see in the second picture above there are areas here that have been pushed up to an almost vertical position from where they were formed.

Today (Sunday - Mother's Day) Arlyene gets to do her favorite thing and go hiking.  We have identified several hikes we want to check out.  The issue here with regards to hiking is that we start out at something above 7500 feet, sometimes 8000 feet and the lack of oxygen makes the hiking several more times the work it would be closer to sea level.  We just don't have enough red blood cells up here to do the job.  We (I) just have to go a little slower.