Sharing photos, videos, vintage images I've discovered, and -- occasionally -- commentary and thoughts from retired life and travels.

on the road

Pikes Peak–Driving to 14,110 feet.

November 28, 2011

2011 09 10 karen 002On September 10, we headed out to drive to the top of Pikes Peak from Garden of the Gods Campground in Colorado Springs, a driving distance of about 25.6 miles, with an elevation change of almost 8000 feet.

We had attempted to drive to the top in 2004, but were stopped at Glen Cove Inn, at 11, 425 feet, due to high winds higher up.  We were told that the winds will likely lessen later.  After waiting a while, we went back down and, later, decided to try to go up on the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway.  When we got to the top, we found that it was brisk and chilly at 34°F with great views, and the wind was low enough that there were already cars in the parking lot.  The ride on the railway was a great experience, though.

On this year’s trip, the wind was not a problem.  With stops, we made it to the top in around 2 hours.

The road has recently been improved significantly as a settlement of a Sierra Club lawsuit. (A lot of the online references say that the road is not paved on the upper half.   This is old information.)  Except for a section less than a mile long, the road is paved all the way to the top.  The road is on federal land administered by the U.S. Forest Service, but is leased to the City of Colorado Springs for operation.  The toll is used to maintain and improve the road, thus requiring no general tax revenue for the road.

Note:  The images and video segments are sequenced from the bottom of the mountain to the top, but most of them were actually taken at pullouts on the way back down.

Pikes Peak is about 10 miles west of Colorado Spring, Colorado.  It was originally called “El Capitan” by Spanish settlers, but was renamed after Zebulon Pike, Jr., an explorer who led an expedition to the area in 1806.  It is one of Colorado’s 54 fourteeners, mountains rising over 14,000 above sea level.

Information and Resources:

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A city park that’s simply amazing.

November 14, 2011

Garden of the Gods - 2004 visit…and it’s free to visit.

Until we visited it in 2004, I had no idea that Garden of the Gods was a Colorado Springs city park.  Most large cities have some nice parks, but few have parks with outstanding geologic features like Garden of the Gods.

We visited the park again this year.

Garden of the Gods Park started with a gift from the family of Charles Elliott Perkins, a former president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad.  Perkins had purchased 480 acres of the current park for a summer home that was never built.  He died in 1907 with his children aware of his wish for the public to be able to enjoy the natural wonder.

A plaque in the park reads, “The Garden of the Gods.  Given to the City of Colorado Springs in 1909 by the children of Charles Elliott Perkins in fulfillment of his wish that it be kept forever free to the public.”

Source of the name “Garden of the Gods” –

The name of the park dates back to August 1859 when two surveyors helping to set up nearby Colorado City were exploring the nearby areas. Upon discovering the site, one of the surveyors, M. S. Beach, suggested that it would be a “capital place for a beer garden.” His companion, the young Rufus Cable, awestruck by the impressive rock formations, exclaimed, “Beer Garden! Why it is a fit place for the gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.” The beer garden never materialized, but the name stuck.  –Wikipedia

Geologic formations –

The outstanding geologic features of the park are the ancient sedimentary beds of red, blue, purple, and white sandstones, conglomerates and limestone that were deposited horizontally, but have now been tilted vertically and faulted by the immense mountain building forces caused by the uplift of the Pikes Peak massif. Evidence of past ages; ancient seas, eroded remains of ancestral mountain ranges, alluvial fans, sandy beaches and great sand dune fields can be read in the rocks. A spectacular shear fault can be observed where the Tower of Babel (Lyons Sandstone) contacts the Fountain Formation. There are many fossils to be seen: marine forms, plant fossils, and some dinosaur fossils.

The hogbacks, so named because they resemble the backs and spines of a pig, are ridges of sandstone whose layers are tilted. Instead of lying horizontally, some layers are even vertically oriented. Each hogback can range up to several hundred feet long, and the tallest (called North Gateway Rock) rises to a height of 320 feet (98 m) tall. A notable rock feature on this hogback, the Kissing Camels, appears to be two very large camels sitting face to face with their lips touching. –Wikipedia

Links:

 

Our travel day was a short one from La Junta, Colorado, to Garden of the Gods Campground, a commercial campground near the Garden of the Gods park.

 

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Northwest Passage–On to Colorado.

November 5, 2011

oklahomaLeaving Canton Lake, our next destination was La Junta, Colorado.

Most of our trips to and from Colorado have required crossing two or more states to go between Arkansas and Colorado.  Our last two trips traveling to Colorado, though,  have crossed only Oklahoma by going though Oklahoma’s panhandle, a relatively narrow section of land that separates the Texan panhandle from Colorado and Kansas.

From Canton Lake to the Colorado border, we traveled State Highway 3, the longest highway in the Oklahoma road system.  The portion we traveled is officially designated “Governor George Nigh’s Northwest Passage.”

The route lies across a portion of the North American Great Plains, a broad expanse of flat land with few trees, comprised mostly of  prairie, steppe and grassland.

2011_trip_map_2nd_leg

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1st stop–Canton Lake

October 27, 2011

The first night of our 2011 trip was Labor Day – camped at Canton Lake, west of Oklahoma City.  We had a reservation for 1 night at the Sandy Cove campground near the dam on the northeast end.  We had stayed there in August 2009 and liked it well enough to stay again.

It was a good location for photographing the sun setting across the lake and I hoped to be able to do a sunset time lapse.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the sunset in one continuous time sequence, but was able to get two good segments, which are included in the video.

It was obvious that the lake was lower this year than it had been in 2009.

The swimming area buoys were certainly  high and dry.

The video includes photographs from both Karen and me, two time lapse sunset segments and a short “home video” segment of our campsite. I’ve produced the video in three formats 1920 x 1080, 1280 x 720, and  640 x 360.

Canton Lake links and resources:

Our first day of travel:

2011_trip_map_1st_leg

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Travels–September and October 2011

October 24, 2011

On Labor Day morning, we were packed and ready to go – and I had no intention of trying to blog the trip as it happened.  Every time I’ve done that in the past, I would get behind or miss a few days and I’d never get back on track.  So this time, I’m going to blog about the trip after the fact.

The following map shows the route that we traveled with our motorhome – about 3,500 miles total.  It does not show all of the little side trips we made with the car that we tow behind the motorhome.

2011_trip_map

We left Monday, September 5th and got home Wednesday, October 19 – a trip of 6 weeks and 3 days.  We spent most of our time in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico and traveled through parts of Oklahoma and Texas while travel from and back to our home in Arkansas.  A lot of the places we visited were old favorites, but we managed to find plenty of new favorites that we had never been to before.

I’ll be posting more as I work through the photos and videos.

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A Windy Texas Travel Day–2011.

October 19, 2011

Lubbock dust stormWe missed the big dust storm in Lubbock, Texas, on Monday by just a couple of hours. Even though we fought the wind all day, we managed to make it past Lubbock before the storm hit.

We were on the homeward leg of a 6 week trip and had planned to go further south, crossing Texas below Dallas and Fort Worth.  Saturday and Sunday nights, we had been camped near Carlsbad, New Mexico.  We were able to get online Sunday night, barely, and checked the weather forecast for where we were thinking of going – wind and blowing dust, with temperatures in the mid to high 90s.  The forecast for the Lubbock area was cooler and windy, but blowing dust was not mentioned. After talking it over for a bit, we decided to head north instead of east.

I did get a some video from our windy day’s trip and produced a short YouTube video.

On this trip, I decided that I was not going to try to keep up with a travel blog.  My intent was to keep a written journal and take lots of photos and video and to incorporate the journal and images into blog posts after we got home.  I was only partially successful.

While I did take lots of photographs and videos, the written journal fell by the wayside after only a few days.

I did read quite a few books over the last six weeks, though.

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