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Tag: west entrance

The Face of The Monument

Colorado National Monument Traverse VI | Grand Junction to Fruita
Sunday, March 10, 2019

After a couple weekends off from adventures because of wet weather and travelling for concerts, it was finally time to get back outside! Although the weather forecast for this weekend wasn’t looking the best, it was certainly looking better than it had over the past couple of weeks, so I planned for us to do our sixth annual Colorado National Monument Traverse on Sunday. This year we were planning to do a repeat of our very first traverse across the face of the Monument that we did back in 2014, except this time we would be hiking it in the opposite direction from the East Entrance near Grand Junction to the West Entrance near Fruita. Since it had been over five years since the last time we hiked this entire route, we were looking forward to it!

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Snow Day at The Monument

Sunday, January 6, 2019

This weekend Diane and I stayed home and took it easy, but we did take some time on Sunday afternoon to visit the west side of the Colorado National Monument for a couple of hours during a snowstorm. We drove a snow-packed Rim Rock Drive to its closure gate at the Independence Monument Viewpoint and stopped to take a few photos along the way. We only saw a handful of other vehicles up there braving the winter road conditions. I was hoping to hike a few of the shorter trails along the rim of Wedding Canyon near the Visitor Center in the snow, but once we got up into the Monument we found that the clouds were low and there was no view into the canyons. I didn’t want to hike those trails with no views, so we decided to skip them and only hiked the Alcove Nature Trail this time. I think the last time I hiked this short trail was almost ten years ago, so it was nice to finally revisit it.

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