What finds and unexpected beauty and granduer we had today.

This morning we continued on CO SR90 a few miles into Paradox Valley and past the small (very small) town of Bedrock. There we turned left (north) onto River Road and followed it alongside the Dolores River. Initially nothing more than a good gravel road this way quicky turned into a great and pleasant surprise. The Dolores River entered a narrow canyon and the road simply followed beside the river at the bottom of the canyon for some miles. After a while we started seeing the remains of some kind of engineering structures protruding from the walls of the canyon. Wooden pieces that looked like the remains of some form of railway or the like were part way up the side of the sheer sandstone walls. Simply amazing!

When we eventually joined up with SR141 we found a tourist plaque that explained the contruction we had seem. It was a Flume way that in all extended 13 miles in length (5 miles along the canyon wall), was 4' deep and 5'4" wide and carried over 23,640,000 gallons of water per day.

SR141 proved also to be a pleasant surprise as it continued our descent of the Dolores River traveling amongst wonderfull red rock cliffs all the way to Gateway Canyon.

After some chores in Fruita and Grand Junction on I-70 we turned off towards Aspen along SR82. At the small town of Basalt we turn slightly north onto FryingPan Road into the White River National Forest. We traveled beside a very fast flowing river, in a narrow valley, with more amazing red cliffs, in the midst of heavy rain fall before arriving at our camp for the night at Ruedi Resevoir Dam.