Day 8: Telluride to Monument Valley

Day 8 got off to a rough start. The bed in our room was more akin to a bowl than a bed making sleeping difficult. I checked road conditions first thing and got the bad news. Highway 550 would not open until 8am and would have alternating 1-way traffic with a pilot car. That didn't sound like a very fun ride down what is supposed to be a very scenic road, thus we opted to take the alternate route.

Highway 145 took us on a much more south-westerly course which shaved almost 100 miles from our original route. We were nearly alone on the road and encountered few other travelers going southward. On a few occasions, we caught ourselves complaining about the low 40-degree temperatures then remembered it was going to be hot at our destination. Kitty and I talked about how we were going to miss the alpine forests of Colorado and before we knew it, we descended into the high desert near Cortez.

I try not to be judgemental when rolling into a new town, but Cortez was giving me a Breaking Bad vibe. This was reinforced after chatting with a man who was walking his dog by us after our breakfast stop. He was a former Ventura resident who moved there because his wife took a job there and told us that Cortez was a rather rough burgh. We took that as our cue to move along without doing any further exploring.

The air warmed as we rode toward the Four Corners Monument and green disappeared from the landscape's palette. The road quality deteriorated considerably, which seemed uncharacteristic compared to all the previous CO roads we had been on. Arriving at the monument, we made our way to the center so we could get the obligatory photo standing in more than one state and browsed the wares of the native American booths. Okay, it's getting hot, time to get moving again.

Heading northwest toward Utah, we came around a bend and were startled by some jackasses hanging out at the side of the road. We were under the impression that the open range signs referred to cattle, but in these parts there were wild horses and donkeys too. After a brief refuge from the heat at a gas station in Mexican Hat, we crested a hill and caught our first glimpse of Monument Valley in the distance. After seeing it in photos and movies, I thought I would be prepared for the scale of it, but it was bigger than I imagined. Had it not been for the heat, we would have explored more, but we settled for several photos instead.