We were most looking forward to the mountains of Colorado but the rain and heavy fog today kept us from viewing any mountains above 10,000 feet since they were in the clouds. We hit our highest altitude of the trip at 9666 feet. It should be downhill from here to Florida. We had a snowball fight at Rustic, Colorado. This town usually exceeds 500 inches of snow a year(WOW that is 42 feet)! All of the states we have visited rely solely on mountain runoff for agricultural irrigation. Most of Colorado gets less than 20 inches of rain during the growing season. The road from Encampment on to Route 14 was an amazing climb. A couple facts that we learned along the way were that; the 13th step of the state capital building in Denver is exactly 1 mile high above sea level(5280 ft) and the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel between Clear Creek & Summit counties is the highest auto tunnel in the world. Bored at an elevation of 11,000 feet under the Continental Divide it is 8,960 feet long and the average daily traffic exceeds 26,000 vehicles. Dwight Eisenhower is the president given credit for the interstate highway system. The first route connected Portland, OR with Washington, DC (interstates 80 & 70).
We have include several pictures of the area ridden despite the fact it was so cloudy. The Mesa in the picture is within inches of being one mile by one mile. The term mesa (Spanish and Portuguese for "table") is an elevated area of land with a flat top and sides that are usually steep cliffs. It takes its name from its characteristic table-top shape. The Mesa in the picture, We were just got use to calling these features Buttes(term used in the NW US), and now in Colorado and the SW USA, they call them a Mesa. The streams are full of native trout! If we had a net, we could have scooped out supper.
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