Escape from The Desert: Silt, CO
It’s hard to overstate the impact that driving up out of Moab into Colorado had on us. For the first time in 6 months we were in a place abundant with beavers, deer, and green things. Leaves! Mountains covered in green trees! Valleys of grass and cattails! Elk! For us who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is constantly wet and ceaselessly growing, this was a wonderful breath of fresh, (relatively) humid air.
In one of those cosmic coincidences, when we stopped for lunch at the truck stop in Grand Junction, we spotted another Solitude just like ours. On closer inspection, I realized it was Garrett and Carolyn from Diary of a Family, fellow RVers I met via Nomad Near Me and had tried to connect with in Tucson but never quite made it. We’d been bouncing around the southwest and just missing each other, but fate put us having lunch together that day. Go figure!
Otherwise the drive was lots of mild climbing, and a feeling much like home as the mountains greened up, and the landscape changed. The KOA here in Silt is rather close to the freeway, but so is everything. I-70 over the western slope runs along the river through many narrow valleys, which makes for a string of towns squeezed into grassy flats sprinkled along the pass. It’s a pretty nice KOA, and very busy. The kids are happily making friends with anyone they can.
Silt is little more than a truck stop and a campground, the nearest town with a grocery store being Rifle, about 15 minutes west. If you keep going north from there a ways into the hills you can get to tiny Rifle Falls state park, a beautiful little oasis with a dramatic waterfall and a limestone cave system. Curiously, the waterfall “built itself” by depositing limestone in small rapids over many thousands of years. The rapids became larger as the limestone accumulated, causing the falls to form. Under them, after many meanders formed and dried up, the limestone started to erode away, forming shallow caves. It makes for fun exploring, with a landscape that hides its geology behind foliage - unlike the desert southwest, where it’s in plain sight.
We’re spending more time cleaning here as well. Now that we’re 8 months in, some of this stuff is catching up to us. We rented a carpet cleaner, but we won’t do that again. What a pain, and for an unimpressive result. Looks like we’ll be saving up for a proper cordless vacuum.
Luke made a friend here, and our families (myself excluded, since I had to work) got to go over to nearby Glenwood Hot Springs to enjoy the pools. The kids have been swimming every chance they get, and it’s fun to be able to take them to a huge swimming complex and not really worry about them. Luke even went off the diving board!
This whole western slope is an interesting part of Colorado. Very sparsely populated, apparently popular for Coloradans to vacation in. Plenty of RVers and vacationers here from elsewhere in the state, not as many from far away. When you get on these little highways into the hills, it looks very Sound of Music, all green alpine valleys and bright skies.
The campground is set right against the Colorado River, which we’ve been following off and on all the way from Yuma last December. This will be our last stay by its side, as from here we head up and over the continental divide and into a whole different hydrology. It’s been a nice reprieve from the busyness of boondocking and exploring in Moab.
