Sep 5 Day 20

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Day 20 will put Utah behind us, as we continue our trek toward the east. Steamboat Springs Colorado is our destination target for today.

Shortly after pulling out of Heber City Utah, we passed the Strawberry Reservoir. The water here was an amazing bright blue. This reservoir is one of Utah's most popular fishing lake. The most common fish caught here are rainbow trout, and kokanee salmon.   

Another few miles down the road, and we start to climb Strawberry Pass. The pass peaks at a little over 8000 feet.

The terrain gets a more rugged as we make our way up and over Strawberry Pass.

As we dropped back down from Strawberry Pass, we drove along this body of water called Starvation Reservoir. The reservoir sits at about 6000 feet, and is about 3500 acres in size. It is part of the Starvation State Park, and is popular for fishing and boating. The blue water color against the white rock shoreline is really eye catching.

A few more miles down the road, and we had to pull over for a special occasion... our wing turned 50 (50,000 miles that is). You can see on the wing gps, that we were just southeast of the reservoir in the town of Duchesne.

After giving the wing a few pats on the saddle, and treating it to a tankful of premium fuel, we continued eastward. The landscape coloring in this area was interesting. The colors pop a little more if you click on the photos and look at the larger versions.

More of the impressive landscape coloring.

We finally crossed the border into Colorado, and shortly thereafter, entered a town called Dinosaur. As you can see, the town has embraced the name, as there are dinosaur sculptures everywhere in the town.

The town is named Dinosaur because the Dinosaur National Monument is just down the road. The park contains tons of dinosaur fossils. 

The dinosaur fossil beds were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He and his crews excavated thousands of fossils and shipped them back to the museum in Pittsburgh, for study and display. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the dinosaur beds as Dinosaur National Monument in 1915. The monument boundaries have expanded from 80 acres, to its present size of over 200,000 acres.

A building in the park was constructed around what is called the "Dinosaur Wall". It is a steeply tilted rock layer which contains hundreds of dinosaur fossils. The enclosing rock has been chipped away to reveal the fossil bones intact for public viewing.

I thought this was an interesting photo. I really liked the dark green crops against the white rock background of the mountains. Nothing special, just a cool pic.

Another area along the road in Colorado where the landscape colors are just amazing.

Yeah, another one of those "roads to nowhere" photos. Sorry I can't help myself.

This was a neat section of road, felt a bit like a roller coaster ride.

As we started to approach the Steamboat Springs area, we got one more section of some interesting rugged terrain.

We arrived at our hotel for the day, and you can see one of the peaks that make up the Steamboat Springs Ski Resort.

Tomorrow should be a great ride. We plan to make our way across Rabbit Ears Pass which summits at roughly 9500 feet and crosses the Continental Divide. Then we will cross Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park. Trail Ridge Road also crosses the Continental Divide as it summits at roughly 12,200 feet. We will continue on toward the Denver area, which will set us up for the 3 day trek home.

Today, we traveled 302 miles from Heber City Utah to Steamboat Springs Colorado. This brings the trip total to 4816 miles. Below is a map of the route from today.