Posts Tagged ‘scenery’
Last Friday we took off for a couple days of camping before I headed back to Grand Junction for two more weeks of work. Pete bought a new tent for us while I was away working and had found a really pretty camping area near Big Meadow up on Wolf Creek Pass. It’s called Park Creek and is in the Rio Grande National Forest. The camp site sits along the headwaters of the Rio Grande River, which was running just behind our tent. The weather was perfect, and the scenery was absolutely gorgeous. We spent a day relaxing at the camp site then we headed out for a scenic drive up to an old mining town called Summitville, which was just eighteen miles farther up the mountain from the camp site. It’s a ghost town, but a few of the old buildings are still standing. Summitville is at about 12,000 feet elevation, which makes for some incredible scenery. There are beautiful alpine flowers, deep green meadows, and awesome mountain vistas. The temperature was 84 degrees when we left the Park Creek camp ground and dropped to 46 degrees at Summitville, it was unbelievable. Just one more reason why the state’s tourism motto is “Colorado Wild”!
Pete’s been working on a patio for the barn and it’s just about done. There’s been a bit of a mud problem since we bought the place; the sloping around the building is not correct causing water to pool around the entry doors. He used some rail road ties that we got for free to create a base for the patio and borders for raising the area near the doors to divert the water. We bought pressure treated 2×10’s for the patio from a local lumber yard that’s going out of business and saved 30% off the regular price. The patio looks very nice, and Pete also built a bench next to the door with a shoe rack below. I’ve started on a low rock wall to extend the railroad tie border to the end of the area in between the parking spaces, and the plan is to make a fire pit and put a table and chairs in the section between the two big pine trees. I’m going to make a rock pathway in the space right in front of the barn, to keep down the amount of mud that gets tracked onto the patio, and next to that will be a small grassy area. The past few days it’s been raining off and on so I’ve not been able to make much progress on the rock work. Hopefully the rest of the week will be nice so we can get this project finished and start refurbishing the table and chairs that will go between the pine trees. When it’s all done the mud factor will be somewhat under control and we’ll have another place on the property to sit and enjoy the scenery.
