Coveys Great Adventure: #84 - September 2021

September 2021 – CO, UT, NV, OR

A guy out walking his llamas isn't
something you see every day

In 2015, we passed right through Gunnison Colorado on our way to the Lottis Creek Campground in the Gunnison National Forest. From there we visited Crested Butte and explored the forest but never got back to Gunnison. This year we stayed in Gunnison and focused on the town. There is a lot to see and do there and in the surrounding areas. We stayed at the Palisades Senior RV Park, about six blocks from downtown, on the grounds of the county senior care and services facility. The whole area is quiet, secure and immaculately maintained by volunteers and work campers. This is a great place, but it is small and reservations are hard to get, so book early. It is also only open from mid-May to mid-September.

Gunnison seems to be a pretty open, friendly town. It’s big enough to have one or two of most services. It appears to be pretty prosperous, too. We didn’t see any signs of civic neglect, and the overall appearance was quite attractive. It’s also a college town, which we always think makes it more vibrant and interesting. Western Colorado University has an attractive campus right down town. With 2,900 students and a couple of hundred faculty, it fits into town without being the focus of the town.

I didn’t look at the map very carefully when we were in Ridgway. I guess I assumed that the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park would be near the town of Gunnison. Actually, it is much, much closer to Ridgway. Despite the 160 mile round trip, we were determined to see it. If you ever get close, make the effort to go. The Grand Canyon is certainly majestic, but this place is just as impressive. It is not as commercialized as the more famous canyon and sees far less traffic, making it a much more personal and pleasurable visit. The pictures don’t come close to the experience of actually being there. With better planning, accessing the bottom is possible, which must be really spectacular; next trip I’ll do a better job.

The Pioneer Museum in Gunnison is a large, eclectic accumulation of items that
are grouped together in a sprawling complex of 30 buildings, barns and sheds housing everything from a locomotive to hundreds of dolls. Two of the largest buildings are dedicated to an extensive car collection that is notable for it’s overall lack of… notability. Most of the vehicles are simply well preserved old cars with little-to-no automotive significance. Someone just took really good care of one and gave it to the museum when they died or stopped driving. That said, I spent most of an afternoon wandering around. The old fire engine and a Cat bulldozer were highlights for me.

Like the museum in Meeker, pianos and parlor organs seemed to be popular donations, but Gunnison has so many that they are packed in too closely to walk through. None of them are playable, so I guess it doesn’t matter that all you can see is an array of water stained and delaminating veneer. As you would imagine, the collection includes lots of old farming and logging equipment, too. Again, none of it has been restored, just cleaned up and parked. If patina is your thing, this place is for you. Only open from May to October, it’s worth a visit.

Tourists went nuts, the locals just went about their business

We decided to revisit Crested Butte. We enjoyed seeing it for the first time several years ago and this trip we were lucky to stumble into the weekly street market. Unfortunately, we got there a few minutes before closing, so a number of the vendors were packing up or had already gone. I did manage to grab the last sourdough bagels as the baker’s booth was being dismantled. They were excellent; I wish they’d had more.

Crested Butte is an unabashed tourist trap that is growing like a weed. Townhouses, condos and houses are under construction in many places in and around town. It seems like every other shop on main street is a restaurant, a bar, a pizza place or an ice cream shop. The other stores sell high end outdoor and leisure wear or expensive, lavishly logo’d sports gear. As popular as this town is during the summer, I can only imagine what getting around must be like once the ski season kicks off and all the rentals fill up. The skiing must be terrific.

We had a few days before we were due in Durango to meet some old friends from Thousand Oaks. On the spur of the moment, we checked the NFS reservation system and found one site that we could fit in at Lottis Creek Campground, one of our top five all-time favorite places. We could only get it for two days, so we booked two additional days in Palisades to catch up on laundry and clean the coach before heading to Durango.

You may recall that we were camped at Lottis Creek when the bear wandered by as Kayeanne and Lucy were sitting outside reading and napping, and pandemonium ensued throughout the campground. We didn’t see any bears this trip, but Lottis Creek is just as lovely, quiet and spectacular as we remembered it. Pictures completely fail to capture the size and subtle colors of the walls of the canyon that the campground is in. At night I think you could hear a sneeze a mile away. Two days was just not long enough, but I’m really glad we decided to go.

There are three feasible routes from Gunnison to Durango. I’ve ridden two of them on motorcycle trips, so we chose the third. I’d ride US 550 or CO 149 thru Lake City anytime, but both would be pretty intense in the coach. Instead, we made a long loop to the east consisting of US 50 - CO 114 – US 285 - CO 112 - US 160 over Wolf Creek Pass and thru Pagosa Springs to Durango. There were some sections that held my attention, but it was a good route.

Junction Creek NFS Campground converted from reservations to FCFS the day
after we arrived. We couldn’t reserve a site with electric hookup, so I got one without, hoping to get one of the power sites when the current occupants left. It worked like a charm. The dust hadn’t settled behind the departing campers the next morning when we backed in, plugged in and set up housekeeping.

Junction Creek is a real gem of a campground that has three real negatives: no dump station, limited water access to refill tanks, and one of the worst access roads we have ever seen. The first two items limit how long we can comfortably stay, but the last one turned out to be the worst. The road is over two miles of dust and ruts. It was so bad that we went straight to a car wash every time we left the campground just to hose off the dust so we could see. The rough surface may have damaged one of our tire pressure monitors, too.

John, Rick, us, Cheryl and Janie

Anyway, those issues notwithstanding, we had a great time. We like Durango, but the reason we came this year was to visit with close friends Janie and Rick Fellows and Cheryl and John Clement. What with Covid disruptions and our travels, we hadn’t seen Janie and Rick for a couple of years or John and Cheryl since 2015.

Well, we had a ball. Lots of great food, very, very good company and a fair amount of wine and song just can’t be beat. One morning we took the Durango to Silverton train with Janie and Rick. It was just as spectacular as we remembered it. John and Cheryl drove up to meet us for lunch. Cheryl is very familiar with Silverton and having an experienced local guide certainly made for a far better experience than our last trip here.

Train from Durango to Silverton - this is a tame section

Waiting for the ladies to shop Kayeanne's pic

One day we wandered the length of main street in old town Durango. I think we toured every shop but fatigue tends to fog my memory. We stopped in to the Strater Hotel, a well preserved, still operating example of the finest in 1890's-era accommodations. It reminded me of the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, AZ, built in roughly the same era and style. The Strater's most famous and long term guest was Louis L'Amour.

On the last night of our visit, everyone gathered around the campfire at our site. John brought his ukulele and led us in song after song as the sun set and night fell in the forest. That is a night that I will remember for a long time. I hope we can all get together again, soon.

We were sorry to leave such good friends, but we had a schedule to keep. We pulled out of Durango and headed northwest to Cape Blanco State Park in Port Orford, Oregon, to spend a week with Leslie and Ray Friebershauser at the state park where we met in 2019. We were all hosts at Cape Blanco Lighthouse that spring, giving tours and regaling visitors with tales of life on the Oregon coast in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They also spent a couple of months at our park in Benson the following winter. Ray’s help was invaluable when I had to replace some of the siding on the casita.

We had Cave Lake to ourselves

It’s about 1,500 miles from Durango to Port Orford. Using interstate highways is supposedly faster but, as usual, we (I) picked a more “scenic” route. In my defense, this time it was actually shorter, if not faster. Anyway, from Durango we headed to Richfield, Utah, which has an RV-friendly Walmart, reasonably priced diesel fuel and convenient propane access. Rested and all fueled up, we pushed on through Moab to Cave Lake State Park just south of Ely, Nevada to dry camp in the parking lot near the dam. We don't fit in any of the campsites. They still charged us $20, which I thought was excessive. We should have left early to beat the ranger’s morning rounds.

We picked up US 50 in Ely and headed west to Reno. It is too far to do that in one day, so we needed an overnight spot somewhere near Austin, NV. Nothing sounded promising, but we took a chance and pulled into the Bob Scott NFS Campground and were early enough to get one of the two spaces in this very small park that are big enough for our rig. We didn’t even have to disconnect the car. With our Senior Pass it was just $5, a much, much better value than Cave Lake. It is a beautiful setting, and quieter than I expected given how close it was to the road. Schroeder really liked it, too. Unfortunately, we both forgot to take pictures.

I’ve long wanted to cross Nevada on US 50, which was called “the loneliest road in America” by Life Magazine in 1986. I don’t think it still deserves that distinction, but there are many long stretches without any sign of habitation except the fences that keep the beefs (or, "beeves", really, look it up) off the boulevard. Kayeanne was pretty bored with it, so it was good that we had cell coverage most of the way.

After three days of dry camping, we wanted a couple of nights with full hookups, and the laundry had been piling up since we left Gunnison. Gold Ranch Casino RV Park in Verdi, NV, just west of Reno had everything we needed, so we dropped anchor there for a couple of nights. We did the laundry, dumped the sewer, refilled the water, restocked at Trader Joe’s and enjoyed our first sushi in weeks. Ah, all of life’s basics fulfilled in just two days, so on to Oregon.

Verdi to Port Orford can be done in two days if you put your mind to it, so we decided to go for it to spend an extra day with Ray and Leslie. I laid out a route that avoided the fire areas and most of I5. Klamath Falls turned out to be just about half way, so we spent the night at the Klamath County Fairgrounds RV Park, which is an exaggeration for a large gravel lot with hookups. What it lacked in ambiance it made up for in convenience. I think there were five campers that night, giving all of us lots of elbow room.

Rolling into Port Orford the next afternoon felt very familiar. We spent two months at Cape Blanco State Park in the spring of 2019 giving tours of the lighthouse, and came to really like Port Orford. One supermarket, one gas station, a half dozen or so restaurants and a food co-op pretty much describes the town that is small enough that US 101 passes right thru without a traffic light or a stop sign. Despite that it has a pretty fair art gallery, an interesting Coast Guard station museum and two great state parks. And, of course, the not-to-be-missed lighthouse when Covid relents. Not bad for a town of about 1,200 people.

Ray and Leslie are once again working in the park, but the lighthouse tours are a Covid casualty, so they are camp hosts, cleaning cabins and selling firewood this year. The four camp sites that are usually reserved for the lighthouse hosts are now available FCFS, and Leslie grabbed one for us that came open the day we arrived. Host sites are the only ones in the park that have sewer connections, which was pretty critical because we wanted to stay a full week and the park doesn’t have a dump station. Despite their work schedules, we got to spend a lot of time with our friends.

This park is truly one of the gems in the Oregon system, even with the lighthouse closure. I went on and on about it in blogs #55 and #56, and suffice it to say it hasn’t changed one bit, except the weather is sure better in the fall than it is in the spring! Schroeder clearly remembered it, too. He led me right to the trails, the horse camp and the group camp areas that he and Lucy thoroughly inspected a couple of years ago.

A couple of our favorite places to eat had closed down, but the Golden Harvest was just as good as we remembered. They still make the best roast turkey and stuffing that I have eaten outside of my kitchen (or Paul Wiklund's, too, I must admit) and they have added a bulgogi entrée that was very good, too. The lemon blueberry cookies, though, are one of my all-time favorite things to eat, and were just as good as ever. When Ray’s Market restarts their smoker after Covid, be sure to try their brisket sandwiches and the ribs.

Bandon is the “big” town about 25 miles or so north of the park. Fish tacos at Tony’s with a double helping of their secret sauce was terrific. When we tried to walk it off, though, we stumbled across Cranberry Sweets and More which we had to check out. Cranberry is not what I think of when I’m looking for sweets, but this place really merits its 5-star reviews. We didn’t try everything, but the tea cookies were delicious, even the cranberry ones.

Da Gurls had a ball

Sooner than we hoped, it was time to leave Ray and Leslie, and head to Nehalem Bay State Park for our seventh season as camp hosts.

Some of the wines we discovered this month include:
Chateau St. Michelle Horse Haven Sauvignon Blanc 2018 – Kayeanne really liked it
Santa Ema Reserve Cab 2018 - Val Chile – Very good
Rough Day Cab – Romania - Maybe the best cheap wine I’ve had in quite awhile
Juan Gil Jumilla 2018 – Spain - Very, very good. Total Wine may have it.

More soon,

Bob