7-9 Sep: We five were joined in Mueller State Park by long-time hiking and camping friends Dick & Sonia. Mueller not only provided camping close to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, but it offers pleasant hiking trails in an attractive location high on a ridge amidst pine forest, grassy meadows, and mountain vistas.
Many excellent specimens of insect and plant fossils have been found at Florissant. They date back about 34 million years, when there was a lake in the area and the climate was not as dry as today. Although the fossils we saw were limited to those displayed in the visitor center, visitors can walk around huge fossilized stumps of redwood trees from that earlier time. Ash deposits from large volcanic eruptions buried the bottom of the redwoods, and later the stumps were fossilized when permeated by silica-rich water. We hiked through a pleasant landscape over a ridge and through a valley floor past the original log house of the widow Adeline Hornbek, whose first husband died and second husband disappeared, leaving her alone with four children. She not only made a go of it, but prospered in that frontier setting.
Next, we all relocated to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. This canyon, carved by the Gunnison River, is renowned for its steep stream gradient, sheer walls, narrowness, and great depth. It was named the Black Canyon because parts of the canyon bottom receive very little direct sunlight. It took a major feat of construction to build a railroad as far down the canyon as the town of Cimarron, but efforts to go farther were stymied, so the railroad had to be built away from the river beyond that point. In addition to short walks out to viewpoints along the canyon rim, we hiked the two-mile Oak Flat Loop trail, which descends part way below the rim but not all the way to the river, and the Rim Rock Trail between the visitor center and the campground.
