Category: Colorado

I made an early start on Saturday morning. Heading for Utah – possibly Moab or thereabouts but the ultimate destination would be Kanab 300 miles further.

This day’s ride along Highway 141 was visually stunning and, as always, the photos just do not do the scenery justice. By mid afternoon, I had a sensory overload!

The first part of the ride is on the edge of the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area is a 209,610-acre  National Conservation Area located in western Colorado southeast of Grand Junction and northwest of Montrose. It is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In 2009 66,280 acres were also designated as the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness. The Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area (NCA) encompasses canyons along the Uncompahgre Plateau along the Gunnison River.

Below: this is the most unusual clock I’ve ever seen. It was fixed to a wall and the outer, or numerals moved around rather than hands. I took this at 2pm.

 

 

 

Note from Christine; The photo below came as an email that said, ‘I love you’ Awww – it was like getting a bunch of flowers 🙂

Note from Christine on the photo below: I couldn’t believe Jan parked the bike so close to the edge! My first thought (heart in mouth) what if there was a landslide? He would have been stranded out in the middle of nowhere. Naughty naughty. I won’t let you go alone again 😉

The Hanging Flume was an open water chute (known as a flume) built over the Dolores River Canyon in Colorado. The Montrose Placer Mining Company built the flume in the 1880s to facilitate gold mining. Some sections of the flume remain attached to the canyon wall, although much of the wood has vanished.

Construction on the Hanging Flume took three years, beginning in 1887. Approximately 24 workers participated in the build, suspended from ropes onto the cliff face. A derrick may also have been used. The construction used 1.8 million board feet of lumber and ended up with a total cost over $100,000. The timber used was mostly Ponderosa pine, a local tree, and it was supported using iron rods. The completed flume was approximately 12 miles (19 km) long and up to 75 feet (23 m) above the river. It began on a dam on the San Miguel River above Uravan, Colorado. The flume’s opening (the head gate) no longer exists, and the connecting ditch has been filled. The actual wooden flume was 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep. When in use, it conveyed 80,000,000 gallons of water each day. The flume was only used for three years before being abandoned. The reason was that the mine itself was closed after the discovery that most of the gold was unrecoverable, and the investors in the project only made $80,000 after investing over $1,000,000 into the mine and associated engineering works. After the closure of the mine, local residents reused the timber.