Soldier Creek Reservoir, UT to Wolford Mountain Reservoir, CO – 310 Miles
They say all good things must come to an end, and this is it – our last night on the road, the (almost) end of our great adventure, this wonderful journey that has been the center of our lives for the past eight weeks. Tomorrow morning we wake up, have a farewell breakfast, stow our gear one last time, and begin the last leg of our longest trip ever. We’ll be home in just two hours driving time from here, a scant hundred miles.
I wouldn’t normally do two 300-plus mile days in a row, but I wanted to spend our last night here at Wolford Mountain Reservoir. It was eleven months ago that we set out on a ten-day aspen tour of northwestern Colorado. We’ve done this the last few years since Jeanette retired from her teaching job, taking advantage of the freedom to travel in the fall to see the changing aspens in the Colorado high country. So it was that in late September last year we left our home in Denver and stopped for our first night here at this campground a few miles north of Kremmling, Colorado. As we paused at the entry gate to the campground to register, a Ford SUV towing a dusty, muddy, Airstream trailer pulled in behind us. I mentioned something about the dust and mud as the fellow driving the rig walked up and he said, “Yeah, it’s been a long journey and this is our last night on the road.” “Where’ve you been?” I asked. “Alaska,” he replied. Alaska -- the magic word. I had been dreaming about such a trip for a year or more, sometimes seriously, sometimes just casually. I had mentioned going to Alaska to Jeanette, but she was having a hard time getting fired up about such a long trip. So as the Alaska traveler and I headed back to our individual vehicles after dropping our fees in the collection box at the campground entrance I said, “Maybe we can get together after dinner and talk about Alaska.” “Sure,” he said cheerfully, “Come on over.” So we did, and the die was cast.
As we sat around their campfire later that evening, their descriptions of the roads they’d driven, the places they’d been, and the things they’d seen in the three months of their trip began to kindle the fire that had been simmering in my wanderlust not only for the past year, but perhaps as long as fifteen years. Not only that, Jeanette began to show more interest in undertaking such a journey. Sure it would be a long way, but we had already been to both coasts in our little motorhome, trips of three to four weeks and five to six thousand miles. Maybe we were ready for a really long adventure. And so it began in earnest…we got serious about the planning, and eventually the execution of this journey that I’ve been writing about and you, my friends, have been reading about for the past several weeks.
Our original route planning didn’t have us coming this way and spending our last night here. In laying out a trip such as this I always try to cover as much new ground as possible – that is, as many roads, highways, and places that we haven’t seen before. In spite of our travels around Colorado over the years we’ve lived here, there are still plenty of new roads and places for us to discover and experience right here in our home state. So I had us veering off US 40 shortly after crossing into Colorado and going down through Rangely and Meeker on some new to us roads, and probably spending the night tonight at Rifle Falls, a small but charming state park where we’d ended last year’s aspen tour. It would then be a three-hour drive up I-70 to home. But as I looked at the map, I realized that I was being called to this place, to revisit where, in a very symbolic way, it all began. So we drove a little farther today, even though much of it was all on roads previously traveled, and we’ll drive a little less tomorrow. Besides, we’d be passing through Steamboat Springs if we came this way, and who can deny that the area around that bustling ski resort and the drive over Rabbit Ears Pass is one of Colorado’s great byways? So here we are, and here it ends. From here it’s a hop, skip, and jump to home. In spite of the fact that this journey officially ends when we pull into the driveway tomorrow, emotionally it ends here at Wolford Mountain Reservoir, with a beautiful sunset followed by a candlelit dinner with some soft Bill Evans and Danny Wright on the iPod in our cozy little home on wheels.
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