colorado river // ADVENTR.co

The Palisade Rim: Lower Loop & Upper Loop Trails

After Work Adventures | Friday, September 25, 2026

I was originally planning to head on over to the Gunnison Gorge for a hike after work today, but shortly before leaving work I checked the weather and saw that there was a storm right over the area I wanted to hike in, and since the road to the trailhead goes through a lot of clay I thought it would be a good idea to skip that for today and stay a little closer to home. While I have hiked the lower Palisade Rim Trail a few times before, I have never actually hiked the upper loop before and have been meaning to do that for quite a while, so I decided to drive over to Palisade to where the Book Cliffs collide with the Grand Mesa and hike both of those loops instead.

The Dominguez-Escalante Expedition: 250 Years Later

Pageant in the Wilderness: Following in the Footsteps of Friars Dominguez & Escalante
Saturday – Monday, September 19-21, 2026 (August 27 – September 17, 1776)

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante Expedition through the southwest and I wanted to do a little something special to celebrate the semiquincentennial of this monumental undertaking in my own little way. Although I would have liked to have been able to follow in the footsteps of Dominguez & Escalante (D&E) for the entirety of their route through New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona, I just don’t have that kind of free time available to me right now and decided it would be nice to just concentrate on the section of their route that is closest to my home. I planned to pick up their route at the Uncompahgre River in Montrose and then follow in their footsteps as closely as I could over the Grand Mesa and Roan Plateau to the White River, and then finally to the Green River in the Uinta Basin in Utah. I figured that I should be able to cover this part of their route in a weekend, but still, even with this shorter route a weekend would probably be too short for me to see it all and I would be limited on the amount of hiking I would be able to do along the way, sticking mostly to roads that roughly follow their original route.

4 Comments

Arizona Strip: Grand Wash to the Marble Platform

Across the Arizona Strip | Friday – Saturday, May 1-2, 2026

After spending Thursday evening in Las Vegas I was up extra early on Friday morning and ready to leave Nevada for a long, hot and dusty drive across the Arizona Strip. I’ve always wanted to enter the Arizona Strip from the west via Gold Butte National Monument and figured this would be a good time to finally do it. I planned to drive all the way across the Arizona Strip to the Marble Platform on the eastern end which would give me the opportunity to see more of the Plateau Province that I started exploring more thoroughly back in 2024. After topping off my gas tank in Moapa for the long drive ahead, I followed the Virgin River to Whitney Pocket at the southern end of the Virgin Mountains and began my trek eastward.

5 Comments

Fruita Frontcountry: Snooks Bottom & Opal Hill Loop

After Work Adventures | Tuesday, April 28, 2026

After leaving work this afternoon I stopped home to pick up Diane and then we headed over to Snooks Bottom along the Colorado River near Fruita so we could go on a short loop hike around the little lake found there and Opal Hill on trails that neither of us had ever been on before. It was quite a bit windier out than we were expecting it to be, but it turned out to be a nice little three mile loop. It’s kind of hard to believe, but this is actually my very first After Work Adventure of the year. I guess I have been really slacking this year! Here are a few photos from our short hike.

The Grand Canyon: Pipe Creek to Diamond Creek

Wednesday – Wednesday, April 8-15, 2026 | Low CFS: 8,030 – High CFS: 8,660

Less than a week after returning from a great rafting trip through the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Pipe Creek Beach at the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail last year, I called up and booked the second half of the trip for April of this year so Diane and I could finish what we had started. Although Arizona River Runners wasn’t running their usual Hiker’s Special trip this spring, their sister company Grand Canyon Whitewater was offering the same trip, so we booked with them since it’s the same company- just with a different name on the sides of the rafts. On this trip we would be hiking down the Bright Angel Trail and then following the current of the Colorado River all the way down to Diamond Creek over the course of seven days, and we were looking forward to seeing this part of the canyon! However, as I have mentioned in the previous two Trip Reports, I had been battling a pretty bad cold for the past week and a half and was finally getting over it right as we left to drive to Arizona on Wednesday, so I was a little concerned about the hike down into the canyon since I hadn’t been able to do much hiking for the past couple of weeks, but I figured it would be OK since the hiking was all downhill…

8 Comments

Tag: colorado river

The Palisade Rim: Lower Loop & Upper Loop Trails

The Dominguez-Escalante Expedition: 250 Years Later

Arizona Strip: Grand Wash to the Marble Platform

Fruita Frontcountry: Snooks Bottom & Opal Hill Loop

The Grand Canyon: Pipe Creek to Diamond Creek