Friday, July 29

Friday, I left around lunch time from the hotel and picked up my rental car, a brand new Ford Taurus. It only had 400 miles on it and was just a couple weeks old. I put 2000 more miles on it during my trip. This is the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs. This is a nice driving/biking park very near the city. Probably a lot of people from the Intel, Lucent and Motoral campuses which are nearby.


Me in the Garden of the Gods.


A petrified redwood stump in Fossil National Monument. This stump, along with many others in the area, was buried by an ancient volcano. During the 1800s, this was a popular tourist site, and many of the stumps are much smaller than they originally were due to the grubby hands of tourists.


A settler's homestead preserved as part of Fossil National Monument in Colorado.


A view of my campsite up in the National Forest near Mueller State Park. This site was at the end of a 3 mile dirt two-track up the side of a mountain into the back of nowhere (or so I thought). I could see the wreck of an old car at the bottom of a cliff when I drove back down. (That's how narrow and steep the road was). But it turned out this isolated site was actually the trailhead for a very popular hike. I talked to the camp host, and he said he gets 1200 hikers a day on the trail to the crags further up the mountain. I hiked the trail on Friday night, when no one was on it, but I didn't see what the big attraction was.