Oklahoma! Not just an amazing musical.

So many cliff dwellings…they must have seen them on Instagram or something.

Ouray or the (Million Dollar) Highway.

Day 9: We left Ouray and headed to Montrose. Our first stop was at a laundromat to do laundry, very exciting but necessary. I have decided that it makes sense to do laundry about 1 time per week traveling, and that laundromats really are pretty quick and don’t take much time. We were out in an hour or so, very fast! Then to Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

We had site A27 reserved for two nights, so that was our first stop, to get our bearings and go ahead and set up the tent. Getting the tent and stuff out of the car frees up some space for other things, so it’s kind of nice when we can. After setting up the tent and checking out the pit toilets (which were, honestly, the best pit toilets I have ever used: clean, with a deodorizing spray that spritzed automatically fairly often.)

First we went to drive down to the East Portal. It’s a beautiful drive down to the river, fairly steep and windy.

There’s a campground at the bottom, which Louie had stayed at in a previous visit, but it doesn’t take reservations so I wasn’t sure. It turned out that we could have grabbed a site, but we were also happy with our current site. We walked along the Gunnison River (which is what carved out the canyon) and even saw a snake!

We had a quick lunch along the river at a picnic ground and then went back to the top of the Canyon to do more sightseeing.

It’s hard to really show the scope of the Black Canyon in pictures: it’s called the Black Canyon because it is deep and narrow, and the other side is pretty close, so the sun doesn’t shine into it very much. We did the whole, drive along the road and pop out at all the stops and walk along the walks, marvel at everything, and take a million pictures of approximately the same view. It was great fun, and Louie even got into taking bird pictures which meant all of this took even more time.

Around 6:30 pm we hadn’t quite seen everything, (that is, all the stops) but we decided to head back and make dinner: we had two nights here which meant there was plenty of time the next day.

The campground was lovely, except for we could hear one campsite playing music loudly and talking until late at night, past quiet hours. This annoys me, especially the music playing: I think there should be no music allowed in the National Park campgrounds because it scares away wildlife!

In the morning we heard rustling around our campsite(finally the people were quiet, ha) and I assumed it was a nearby camper, but it was actually a small group of deer poking around.

We headed out on a loop hike from the campground to the visitor’s center and back, on the Rim Rock Trail, the Oak Flat Loop Trail and the Uplands Trail. Some parts were a little scary, as it goes down below the edge a bit and then back up, but overall it was just a nice hike, with a bit of sun by the end. (You can basically climb into the canyon, but you can’t really hike into it, and there are very limited permits to go into the canyon, which I had no desire for anyway, but the Oak Flat Trail dips over the edge a little bit.

We were back at the campground so we had lunch, relaxed a bit, and saw some more deer walking around. Well, likely the same deer.

Anyway, then we refilled our waters and headed out to “finish” the South Rim. We had a few more stops and the last one had a little hike to Lookout Point. It was beautiful: we saw a super cool lizard and some wild turkeys in addition to amazing scenery.

The second night we had another, closer, set of annoyingly loud music playing campers, who continued partying past quiet hours. The camp host was not nearby and I think they just didn’t seem to care that the campground was so loud. It was unfortunate, because the setting was absolutely gorgeous and most people were quiet and respectful, normal national park campers, with just a few rude groups which can ruin the whole vibe. I wish people would find a different place to party and that the campground hosts/rangers had made sure quiet hours were observed. It gets light around 5:30 am so it’s nice to get some sleep while it’s dark!

Anyway, the next morning we headed out towards our next stop, Crested Butte. I’ll leave things there, and I hope I can get the next installment out more quickly than this one!

One more thing to add: we visited the South Rim of the Black Canyon, You can visit the North Rim as well, but it takes several hours to drive from one to the other: there is no easy way around. So while we could have done that we decided to save it for another trip. It is less busy, supposedly, though we were surprised how busy the South Rim was: everybody said it was not crowded and that hardly anybody went there! I suppose it was Memorial Day Weekend and that probably contributed to the noise and slight busy-ness.