western. scenery | Meridian Jacobs' Blog

I wrote the previous post about this trip a week ago. Now I have to look at the map to figure out where we were for some of this. There was beautiful scenery throughout the trip, but there were a few days where the main memory is of things that happened on the road. This is one of those days.

Reminiscent of Day 3 with the highway backup west of Green River, traffic came to a stop on Hwy 24, just west of Hartsel, Colorado. The plan was to get to Colorado National Monument on the western border of the state so we could explore and camp there. We were planning to turn north at the upcoming junction (where there are cars to the right in the photo) or the next one, taking us through Leadville.

It turns out that neither choice was going to be possible, at least not for hours. The accident that had stopped traffic involve a fatality. As we waited, we could see that CPR was underway…until it wasn’t. At that point we were told that cars would have to turn back. Our only option for continuing west was to head back southeast to Cañon City and catch Hwy. 50 going west.

We saw beautiful country, I found it interesting that we were following the Arkansas River, the river I had walked along every morning while in Wichita only the month before.

I noticed the unnatural look to this part of the forest and thought maybe it had to do with logging. Now I wonder if those are all ski runs because this is home to Monarch Mountain ski resort.

The pass is at 11,312′. Our truck that is used to living at almost sea level was not happy about these high mountain highways.

More gorgeous country along the way. At some point Dan saw that the truck’s battery gauge indicated a problem. He had replaced the battery just two weeks before this. We made it to Gunnison and knew that we needed to figure out what was wrong before going farther west. This was a Sunday afternoon–not a lot of options in a small town if we needed a mechanic. I found the address of a towing business and we saw the owner washing his truck, He agreed with Dan’s opinion that it might be a bad alternator. He directed us to Ace Hardware and O’Reilly’s which were both open. We started with Ace, looking for a tester of some kind. When we told them the problem and that we were heading west they alerted us to bridge work being done between Gunnison and Grand Junction. Road crews were replacing welds on some of the older bridges and there were road closures in effect. Hwy. 50 uses two bridges to cross Blue Mesa Reservoir. The Ace employee looked on his computer to find the schedule and showed us that there was a two hour window from 4:30 to 6:30 to get across those bridges if we were to continue the trip that evening.

It was about 4:15 when we got to O’Reilly’s where an employee tested the alternator and found it to be the problem. They had one that would work for this truck and told us we could park in the back to install it. Notice the black car behind Dan. That was someone replacing a radiator so he could continue on to Texas.