Today we left our forest camp early to avoid the heat, but somehow still ended up driving in the heat. We crossed into Colorado and stopped at a town called Montrose, which had a Walmart. We needed supplies so did a big shop, enjoying the air-conditioning in the store.

We’d managed to find a park in the shade at Walmart, so as it was too hot to drive, we spent the afternoon there. It was about 5pm by the time we decided it was cool enough to leave, neither of us really wanting to stay the night in a Walmart carpark. 

We stopped at the hardware store, looking for an adaptor to be able to power our starlink as our powerstation here is too weak. We couldn’t find one but ended up buying a safe to keep our laptops in. We really like the safe we have in Bertie, and even though we probably don’t need it, it’s nice to have somewhere to store our laptops rather than having them lying around.

As we continued out of town, I was thinking how it had been a “nothing” day. And then I saw a sign turning off to the black canyon national park. I had never heard of this place, but we were just driving past, it would have seemed silly not to visit. It was 6.30pm by this stage and sun sets at 7.30pm. We don’t like to drive after dark in the fear of hitting deer, so we hoped we might find somewhere to camp in the park.

But when we got there, the campground had completely burned down. A fire had swept through the place leaving eerie looking black trees all over the place. We stopped at the first scenic view point and Wow! The canyon walls were sheer vertical drops down into the canyon. It was like nothing I had ever seen. And the entire drive was like this, it was incredible. 

And you would think we might have planned things like this, but we arrived at sunset point right on sunset. A pure fluke! So, of course, we had to stay and watch the sunset. And it was beautiful. Even driving back under the blood red sky was unreal. We stopped off at another viewpoint and took a walk under the moonlight. The colours at this time of night made everything look surreal, and reminded me a bit of the midnight sun.

Then came the task of finding somewhere to sleep for the night. It was only 15 minutes back to Montrose, so I suggested we backtrack and sleep in the Walmart carpark. Mike wanted to continue onwards. So in the dark we drove, narrowly missing one deer. 

There were a couple of boondocking sites along the way, but we weren’t keen to venture onto dirt roads in the dark with Rodgers poor lighting. It wasn’t until 10pm that we found a national forest campground on the edge of a lake.  We pulled in, absolutely exhausted, and fell asleep. It will be a surprise to see where we are in the morning.