Car Rides and Canyons: Black Canyon of the Gunnison

By Sarah Ann
August 25, 2018

Today was day two of our trip to Utah. We always make jokes about leaving kids places but funny thing is on this trip we left Taylor at home. (He has band camp and soccer so he will be staying at friends' houses.) And we are leaving Rachel in Utah for this weird thing called college. It involves kids living on their own, getting educated and becoming grown-ups. Rachel it going to attend BYU (Brigham Young University).

We decided to skip the blog yesterday but I think I can sum it up in one sentence: we drove for 13 hours. I am not going to fill you in on all the songs and books we listened to (I will say we listened to the entire 13 at Dinner by Agatha Christie), gas stations we stopped at or conversations we had. We ended the day in a hotel in the middle of nowhere Colorado. Today we resumed our journey.

We started today by driving six hours. Our view slowly changed from flat land full of brown grass everywhere to becoming more mountainous and red. We enjoyed the adventures of eating, listening to Fablehaven and being passed by a Texas Ferrari/Lamborghini gang.

Despite our lovely car ride, we were all glad to arrive at our first national park of this trip. The best part was my grandparents met us there. This national park is called Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Gunnison if the name of the river that flows through black cliffs. It was very striking.

here we are with my grandparents

Here is the canyon

We then through stopping every mile or two to talk to a look-out, each one amazing. A few things I want to saw about the view: first of all, the cliffs had stripes on them. They didn't look natural. The second is that the river which at points was over 7,000 feet below us, looked narrow when in reality it was seldom thinner than 45 feet. Thirdly, when I looked at the cliffs, they kind of hurt my head and made me dizzy. It's hard to describe but it's like my eyes had a hard time understanding what they were seeing. My grandpa and mom felt the same way. 

There's the Gunnison River at the bottom

You can see the stripes on the cliffs here

We went on a last longer hike which was 1.5 miles round trip. We were worried that it might start raining since it was overcast with a few sprinkles but luckily it didn't. After returning, we ate dinner at some picnic tables. Unfortunately, Rachel wasn't feeling too well from a mixture of not drinking enough water combined with being at a high altitude. Not to worry - after drinking a lot of water and driving back down, she felt better.

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