10-3-08 Friday (Here Comes the Bride)

Off to Black Canyon we went - but not without noticing the local Montrose True Value store rented "wedding supplies". I thought this to be a little odd. Buy a hammer, rent an arch covered in tulle. How can you go wrong?

Tired of paying $15.00 each time to get into a National Park, we decided to buy an annual pass for $80.00. We could have used it at Yellowstone and gotten a discount at the Arch in St. Louis. We'll use it for many other places to come so hopefully it will be worth it. If nothing else, we can use it to scrape the kitty. (L1/L2 reference)

Jim packed a lunch for us today, so we were able to eat something other than junk food. It was our first picnic we've ever packed. Our first was with John and Tonia.

When we arrived to Black Canyon, we stopped off at the Visitor Center where we were just in time to catch a 30 minute video about it's history. Here's an excerpt from the web about Black Canyon:

Most rivers of the Southwest cut through relatively soft sedimentary rock, forming canyons that tend to be quite wide, colorful and stepped - descending in a series of cliffs and ledges through layers of differing hardness. When rivers flow across harder igneous rock they produce steeper gorges, spectacular in different ways, such as Hell's Canyon in Idaho, the deepest in the US, or the multicolored Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in Wyoming. One of the steepest, darkest and most rugged of such canyons is formed by the Gunnison River as it flows through hard ancient rocks at the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, on its way to joining the Colorado river at Grand Junction. The canyon walls are composed of volcanic schist, predominantly black in color, and as the gorge reaches depths of over 2,000 feet while often being only 1,500 feet across, sunlight illuminates the walls only briefly, hence the name 'Black Canyon'. It is unsettling, almost frightening to stand at the very edge of one of the canyon overlooks, such is the menace and sheerness of the jagged rocks below.


It is beautiful and of course, being so many photos, I've prepared a slideshow. I know, I know (bowing). There's like 40 pictures..... really..... go ahead and get some popcorn, we'll all wait for you.