The kids and I are drinking orange juice and eating rolls waiting for the sun to come up over the mesa. The ranger let everyone go in before the sun came up so we could see what we were supposed to be looking at. The cave is very small.

The ranger sits at the top of a slope in it and 2 or 3 people go through the narrow opening and climb up a rock to see the marks. No, I wasn’t the only one there, there were probably 25 people there.

I had probably driven the furthest though; one guy was from Kansas and depending on where in Kansas he was, I may have driven more than he did. So, we looked at the ruins of a dust bowl house and barn and waited.


Finally, there it is.

Joel and Bethany go in first, then Grace and I. We see this:

Joel isn’t impressed; he thought it would be bigger and grandiose. I remind him that he just saw the 2nd day of this year that the sun lit up those markings. We climb up here and Bethany found a neat marking.




Here is the dust bowl house.

More marks.

When the sun came up the rocks went from a pale red to a glowing red-orange, aren’t they pretty?

After getting one more look at a mostly dark wall we had to leave. How very cool to see the sun peep through the crack in sandstone that formed this cave and look at markings that mark off the season. Today is Fall and we know it!

The ranger locked the cave and we went back to our tent.


We got to camp right in front of the canyon wall.

As we walked around exploring I finally realized what that ‘thunk, plink, plunk’ sound was from last night. I thought it was rain, nope. It was grasshoppers. They had all different sizes from baby to Grandpa grasshoppers. Grace found this one.

He wasn’t a very fast hopper. We walked around the side of the camp site and found some more markings.


Then the girls climbed up here, well Hannah tried to climb up there.



Then it was time to take down the tent and pack it up. Now that I had gone the back way, I knew how to get back home and cut off 50 miles. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but believe me 50 miles less in the car is a lot. Here are some leaving the canyon pics where we go from canyon back to mesa and then grassland again.



Back on road 18 (roads aren’t important enough to have names here, so everything is road BB or road 13) I kept seeing yellow things on the side of the road. I pulled over and pick up little round, yellow squash. I guess they planted them on either side of the road to prevent washout. They couldn’t have been wild squash it was too neatly planted.

I can only imagine the flooding if they get rain here where everything is dirt.

Going a different way home meant we went towards Trinidad, which has nothing and passed though a few more nothing towns until Pueblo. We stopped there and ate lunch then went straight home and unpacked the filthy car.


Even though the wind gave us a sleepless night the opportunity to see something that happens just twice a year was well worth the drive and stay.