If you have three days in a spot, you’d better make them count. Elizabeth and I were halfway through our first day in southwest Colorado, and it really felt like there was more to see from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Somehow over the last few years, I’ve become kind of a travel/parks snob, and just driving the main road like every other tourist no longer does it for me. But outside of getting one of those permits to reach the canyon floor, there isn’t a whole lot more you can do inside Black Canyon National Park.
Fortunately…
Just east of the national park, the East Portal Road leads you down to the canyon floor. I had read some warnings about the drive down there, which is evidently extremely steep:
In reality, it could have been worse:
Elizabeth found it to be nerve-wracking, but that’s not exactly what we call a shock. At least it was paved the whole way and traffic was fairly light (a bit of a surprise for midafternoon on a holiday weekend in May). It was nice to finally start to feel a little bit more level with the terrain, rather than being 1,000 feet above it.
Although the canyon isn’t as insanely steep in the East Portal as it is a little bit downstream, there still isn’t a whole lot of space for someone to stretch out alongside the river. This is especially true in late May, when snowmelt is raging off of the Elk and San Juan Ranges. The whole reason this little unit exists and someone bothered to send a road down to the bottom is because of the Gunnison Tunnel – an irrigation tunnel built a full century ago to provide water to the Uncompaghre Valley. At the site of the tunnel, there’s a small dam on the river that doesn’t exactly stop the current of the river, but slows it down just enough to divert some water. It’s a morbidly funny reason to be able to access such a beautiful spot – because short-sighted humans in their constant lust for water long ago decided they needed the spot.
You can park right alongside the Gunnison just upstream of the dam, though signs are posted every few feet to let you know that you really shouldn’t swim in the river unless you want to get yeeted over a dam or sucked into a 6-mile-long irrigation tunnel or something. Hopefully the signs work.
The dam had a little waterfall that probably has a nice, placid cascade over it for about 10.5 months out of the year. In late May, it has a raging torrent with one of those super fun hydraulic jumps you see at the bottom of manmade waterfalls.
How could they ever run out of water to divert if the river is always like that? (It’s not).
At the downstream terminus of the East Portal Road, AllTrails has a short trail marked along the riverside. It’s a little under a mile out-and-back, so there wasn’t much time commitment, but it promised some quality time walking along the river that I’d sorely felt the lack of. Only one problem:
It’s a little hard to walk on a trail that’s several feet deep in churning, whirlpooling snowmelt.
So instead Elizabeth and I stood at the water’s edge for a few minutes and just enjoyed the quiet. No one else was around. If I was a fisherman, this would be a great place to cast a line and spend an afternoon – although you’d probably want to get out into the sun since it was a little chilly in the shade. Speaking of chilly, the water certainly earned that phrase. I waded out ankle-deep with the bravado of a guy who had stood in colder lakes in Glacier National Park before – and my feet almost immediately started going numb. We had a competition to see who could stay in the cold water longer, which I won with the pure stubbornness of a Michigander who refuses to acknowledge that anything else could ever be cold. At least it led to this nice little picture:
I doubt we were down in the East Portal for more than maybe an hour or so, but it really tied up the Black Canyon trip nicely with a bow. I’d still like to go back (there’s a shocker), but probably with Jason or someone else with some hardcore experience to try to take the Gunnison Route down to the river floor. That doesn’t really seem like it would be Elizabeth’s cup of tea.
From there, it was time to head to our cabin to check in, since the front office was only open until 6:00. There was once again that beautiful view of the snow-capped San Juans to the south as our car crested the ridge on the South Rim of Black Canyon, with the view fading away as the road rolled back downhill toward the Uncompaghre Valley and the town of Montrose.
Our cabin was on the south side of town in a charming little RV park. I’ll include pictures of the cabin and the park in a future blog post. The only problem we really had was getting back out of the property – the gate was motion-activated but we weren’t parking in the right spot to activate it. This led to several minutes of wandering around inside the parking area before we finally figured out how to get back out into town.
Dinner on our first night in Montrose was at Colorado Boy Brewery and Pizzeria downtown. I’m not normally a huge person for pizza, but brewery pizzas are generally on the higher tier. This was no exception. The “jalapeno popper” pizza was an electric decision.
That wasn’t what stole the night for me, however. Instead, it was the size of Colorado Boy’s beer flights. Breweries out West seem to have a much better idea of the amount of beer a Nolan really wants than those east of the Rockies. In this case, they let me choose eight beers for my flight.
It goes without saying that even drinking 80% of that flight was enough to have me solidly drunk by the time we left.
Drunk Nolan made one risky decision that evening – agreeing with Elizabeth on a trip to Coldstone. There’s nothing that can turn a solid buzz sour quite like putting a bunch of dairy in your stomach. I must have gotten away with it, though, and Coldstone’s ice cream was exactly the right ballast needed to sober up. That was good – we had an early start planned for the next morning.
Thanks to a clerical error (me. I’m the clerical error), our cabin was actually a double-twin-bunk affair. As guilty as I felt, there’s no denying it – Elizabeth was asleep long before twilight had faded away outside the curtains. I wasn’t long behind her. Our first day in Colorado had sort of been the headliner – a national park! – but it had also taken on the quality of an appetizer. Because as cool as Black Canyon of the Gunnison is, and I fully recommend it, it has nothing on the San Juans.
