June 24th - Royal Gorge, Colorado

Unfortunately the wind picked up during the night and started blowing the tent around. I remember thinking, “Boy is this noisy!”, and Monika remembers thinking “Is the tent going to collapse?” The side pegs did pull up by about 5 o’clock in the morning with the result that the two ends of our oval-shaped tent collapsed inward. The center where we were sleeping was still intact, so I kept trying to get back to sleep, but finally a gust of wind blew in the tent and knocked over the folding chair next to me. Things that I had put on the chair for the night came crashing to the floor, and I finally got up to go outside and pound in some more stakes. That helped our situation inside, but woke me up so thoroughly that getting back to sleep was not an option. The bottom line of all this folderol was that neither of us got much sleep.

We finally gave up trying to sleep around 5 a.m. because we knew we had a long drive to the Royal Gorge for the day’s walk and the starting times were limited to the period between 6 and 9 a.m. As we were driving out of the campground after a quick breakfast of cold cereal, we were surprised to see a black bear at the garbage cans near our campsite. These are special bear-proof cans, so I don’t think he actually got anything, but he was definitely interested and now all of those anti-bear precautions we had been following suddenly took on a whole new significance.

I was feeling pretty groggy but Monika was in even worse shape, so I drove down the mountain and thru Colorado Springs to curl around back to the Royal Gorge. It was a pretty indirect route, but we had tried the direct route the day before and I certainly didn’t want to combine a semi-comatose driver with a hair-raising sidewinder drive along the edge of a mountain valley—the results could have been disastrous. We also both agreed to take an afternoon nap if we could, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m.!

We revived somewhat after we started the walk—walking along and chatting with some Volksmarching friends from back east helped wake us up. The first part of the walk was alongside the valley to some lookout points for the Royal Gorge, which is as spectacular as the name suggests. The gorge has been carved over the ages by the Arkansas River and is about a thousand feet deep, ¼ of a mile across, and several miles long. Our walk route returned to the entrance for the Royal Gorge Park that basically consists of several attractions situated around the gorge.

One attraction dating to 1929 is a suspension bridge over the gorge that is billed as the world’s highest suspension bridge. It is still in use for traffic for County Road 3A, but mainly the bridge is full of pedestrian sightseers. Our walk route led us across the bridge to a checkpoint and then back again, so we could inspect it from both directions whilst strolling along. The views up and down the gorge are magnificent, so I would certainly recommend walking across it to anyone who gets the chance. The bridge is slightly shaky, especially when a heavy car or truck went by, and you could see thru the gaps in the would planks to the river and rocks a thousand feet below, which was a little scary but fun. But we were told that it is now a lot more stable since they put stabilizing cables on each side. Before that it really must have been swinging like Galloping Gerty—one lady said she became seasick while trying to cross it on a windy day ten or twenty years ago.

When we returned across the bridge to the finish point our walk was over, but New Balance had subsidized free entry for all the walkers that day so we could go back and look at the other attractions. We got in line to take the funicular down to the gorge, and while we were waiting we were treated to a flock of hummingbirds sipping sugar water from two nearby feeders—cute birds but very territorial and a lot more feisty than I had expected. [p6240060.jpg] [p6240064.jpg] [p6240074.jpg] The funicular was quite old and consisted of a slightly rusty, half-open steel cage, but I judged it was sturdy enough and climbed aboard. As the car descended the track to the floor of the valley, we were treated to a really grand view of this part of the gorge—sheer and rocky reddish-brown cliffs led straight down the river in the valley, just like the Grand Canyon but on a much smaller scale. [p6240058.jpg] [p6240093.jpg] At the bottom of the valley we all climbed out to walk out to an overlook, but this was more of an “underlook” because the interesting scenery was all straight up from our vantage point. The suspension bridge looked like an insubstantial spidery span way above us, just like when we were on the bridge the train in the valley looked for all the world like an HO scale model train. The Arkansas River also looked much more impressive close up, and I later learned that the raft trip thru the valley includes class IV and V rapids, which is as bad as it gets. [p6240086.jpg] [p6240084.jpg] We returned up the funicular, had some lunch, and checked out other attractions. One was a cable car that ran from one side of the valley to the other—we didn’t try it but those who did said it was quite smooth and stable. The other thing we saw was a giant swing that would swing up to 3 persons in a pod out over the lip of the cliff. This swing thing was really big and riding it would probably give a big adrenaline rush, but I judged that to be more a young person’s thing. A merry-go-round we saw on the way back was more our speed, so we both took a ride on that before driving back to the campsite. [p6240047.jpg] [p6240111.jpg] [p6240135.jpg] We tried another “shortcut” by taking Highway 9 and some county roads back to the campsite, and fortunately they were all paved, marked roads. I was pretty close to exhaustion by this point, so much so that when we arrived at the park entrance and were waiting behind an RV registering at the park entrance, I closed my eyes and asked Monika to tell me when the RV moved. But we made it back to our tent and turned in. The wind was still beating the tent about quite a bit so Monika couldn’t really sleep but I certainly did. We had a simple dinner of milk, bread and cheese and we were both still tired so we turned in early for the night.