Chapter 76 -- Pawnee National Grasslands
5/4/2005 to 5/7/2005
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The eta Aquarid meteor shower that would peak the nights of May 5 and 6 offered an excuse for us to find a campsite far from city lights, and this seemed like a good time of year to explore the eastern plains of Colorado. An Internet search identified only half a dozen campgrounds that were well away from towns and busy highways and unlikely to have bright campground lights. We decided to try Crow Valley Recreation Area, in the Pawnee National Grasslands, northeast of Greeley and close to the Wyoming border, about 2 1/2 hours from our home. It's also an opportunity for Helen to get some experience with all aspects of preparing, driving, and maintaining the motorhome. She wants to be able to take it to her out-of-town flower show events on her own, starting next week. So for this trip, she will do everything and I'll just watch and answer questions.
Wednesday, May 4: This is our first trip of the year. Un-winterizing and packing the RV took longer than I expected, and we're still developing the checklists and procedures that will speed the process. So we didn't get under way until almost noon. Fortunately, it's not a long drive to our destination.
Almost as soon as we got on the highway near home, Helen commented that the motorhome "didn't feel right", and then noticed that the steering wheel was about 20 degrees off-center while driving straight. We pulled over and I got out, checked for flat or hot tires and verified that the tow bar was set up properly, without finding any problem. Then we switched positions and I drove for a couple of miles. It indeed didn't "feel right". There was no significant crosswind. I pulled off and checked everything again and still couldn't find a problem, and decided to drive a bit further, as slowly as I dared on the expressway, while puzzling about what might be wrong.
After just a few miles, a passenger in a passing car caught my attention and indicated something was wrong at the rear of our rig. I dove off the expressway at the next exit and found a wide spot on the shoulder of the ramp. The front tires of the toad, particularly the left front, were very hot, with the highest temperature on the tread and the rest of the tire and the brake disks quite a bit cooler. The tread was scuffed up a bit. The left tire must have gotten hot enough to start smoking, in order for the passing motorist to have noticed something wrong.
I had noticed when I'd pulled off earlier that the front wheels of the Jeep weren't quite straight. But since I'd turned fairly sharply to get off the road between the close-spaced roadside reflectors, and the jeep was therefore at an angle to the motorhome, I didn't think this was unusual. Wrong! Somehow, as we completed the preparations for towing, we'd managed to leave the jeep's ignition key in the locked position. With our first turn, the steering locked with the wheels turned slightly off center to the right. So the jeep was constantly trying to turn slightly right, pushing the rear of the motorhome to the right, requiring that the motorhome be steered to the right to compensate.
Unlocking the Jeep steering fixed the problem. Everything felt normal again, and 100 miles later at our destination, the scuffed tire tread had already worn smooth. So I think there's no lasting damage, other than perhaps losing a few thousand miles of tread life. It remains to be seen whether the tires got hot enough to do structural damage in the belt area under the tread, but the sidewalls remained quite cool so I'm optimistic.
From Denver, we took I-76 to US-85 almost to Greeley, then turned east in US-34 for a few miles. We turned north on SR-37, then turned onto SR-392 which led us to the campground. US-85 is Rural America with the highway following railroad tracks and grain elevators defining the small towns along the way. The distant Rocky Mountains are visible behind fields forming a checkerboard of lush green winter wheat with squares of plowed and ready to be planted fields. Local business signs were packers or processors of beans, grain, potatoes and sugar beets and farm equipment sales. The roads and railway follow an historic travel route that dates far back into history - down Clear Creek from our home to the South Platte, then down the South Platte to where it is fed by the Big Thompson and Cache la Poudre Rivers, then up Crow Creek to our campsite (and our travels tomorrow will continue up Crow Creek to the Wyoming border).
The bottom lands along the South Platte River are mostly irrigated, using ditches from the river and its tributaries. East of Greeley, as we drove northeast and diverged from the river into higher and more rolling terrain, irrigation from ditches was replaced by scattered irrigation from deep wells, and then disappeared completely. From here on, we travel through dry ranch lands, with scattered herds of cattle and occasional fields of hay. We see occasional attempts to grow other crops without irrigation. We've both recently read John Michener's "Centennial", which exhaustively and colorfully explores the history of this immediate area, enhancing our enjoyment and understanding of what we're seeing.
Pawnee National Grasslands is operated by the National Forest Service, as part of Roosevelt National Forest, and spans an area 100 miles east to west and 40 miles north to south. It's a checkerboard of public and private land, with the public portions open to dispersed camping as long as motor vehicles stay within 300 feet of numbered roads. Navigation on the roads is surprisingly easy, thanks to Weld County's systematic road numbering system.
Like most of the Great Plains, land is divided into one-mile-square, 640-acre "Sections". Most county roads run along section boundaries, and the section boundaries are numbered - east-west boundary lines have even numbers and north-south lines have odd numbers. Every road intersection has a sign with these numbers. But not all section boundaries have roads. The roads often run for just a few miles, and a route is a zigzag with abrupt 90-degree turns at section corners. A few of these roads are paved, many are smoothly graded gravel, and a few are unimproved dirt. This county road system is supplemented with National Forest Service roads, which generally are unimproved two-tracks. Those that are open to the public are neatly labeled with 3-digit NFS road numbers.
Midway along the south edge of the Grasslands, Crow Valley Recreation Area offers camping (no hookups), vault toilets, hiking trails, and a small outdoor farm implement museum. Three of the 10 campsites were occupied when we arrived, mid-afternoon on Wednesday. By Friday evening, all 10 sites were occupied and an unlabeled site, apparently used as an overflow site, was also occupied. The sites are well spaced, and all are and suitable for large motorhomes. Three are double sites - a driveway wide enough for two RV's side by side. With our Golden Age pass, the single sites cost $5, or $7 for the double sites. This area is well known for good bird-watching, and several of the other campers were serious birders. The guy in site next to us had a large astronomical telescope set up.
(Click the photo or the above
link for a
larger image.)
We hung out at the campground for the late afternoon and evening, taking one short walk
along a trail that heads north through the Crow Creek valley. It's sandy near-desert, with
sparse tufts of grass and frequent yucca and opuntia. In a few places, there were
attractive patches of sand lily and evening primrose.
Wednesday night had quite a bit of cloud cover -- not good for star or meteor watching.
5/5/05: The agenda today is to explore the country between here and Pawnee Buttes. We started north on CR-77, one of the few paved roads in the area. About 10 miles north of the campground, we were startled to see a herd of pronghorn grazing a few hundred yards west of the highway. We pulled off the road, got out the binoculars, and verified that these were indeed pronghorn - probably the first time we've seen them in the wild. Although they look a little like deer and a little like African antelope, they are not related to either, and are the only remaining member of their ancient family.
At CR-120, we turned east and passed through Grover, another of the tiny hamlets that are slowly becoming ghost towns. Most are 6 to 10 blocks square, with gravel roads except for one paved access road, small frame houses, perhaps one or two big substantial brick homes, one or two small churches (still in use and often the only well-maintained buildings) and a few abandoned business buildings. A farmer's cooperative grain elevator and general store often was the dominant structure, but most of these have closed, victims of the centralization allowed by improved roads and faster transportation. A few of these towns still have an operating general store, offering a limited selection of groceries and not much else. We saw no functioning gas stations and no other types of functioning businesses in these places. Grover does have a central K-12 school, serving a huge area and having 124 students.
From Grover, we headed about 12 miles southeast to the trailhead for the Pawnee Buttes hiking trails. The Buttes are a pair of landmark 300-foot-high steep-sided pillars, (add photo here) separated from a less-steep eroded escarpment that extends for several miles. The trail we hiked goes 1.5 miles through a gap in this escarpment to the base of the westernmost Butte. We hiked the first mile or so, enjoying half a dozen types of wildflower among the yucca and opuntia and interesting eroded sedimentary rocks along the dry stream beds. We'd have liked to hike to the top of the escarpment to enjoy the views, but were disappointed to find that access to the cliffs and the top of the escarpment is currently prohibited, to protect the raptors during their nesting season.
(Click the photo or the above
link for a
larger image.)
Leaving Pawnee Buttes, we wandered along the gravel county roads back to our campground. Just south of the Buttes area along FS 807 we found several nice isolated spots to camp, some of them on small ridges that offer long views across the rolling grasslands, with access smooth enough to allow large RV's. Every few miles, we would see a windmill, with a pump and water tank for livestock. None of them were operating. The weather is perfect - pleasantly cool, with a few fluffy white clouds in a deep blue sky. The atmosphere is clear enough so that we can see the snowy peaks of the Rockies 80 miles to the west. At one point along an unimproved dirt road, we saw a small herd of pronghorn, just off the road relatively close to us. They ran off ahead of us, going at least twice our 20 mph speed.
After dark, the sky remained clear enough for watching the meteor shower - but the shower was a dud. This event is mainly a southern hemisphere show, and we knew it would be weak. Helen saw about three meteors in an hour of watching. I saw none in the 15 minutes or so that I watched. But the rest of the sky was very nice. There is just a little glow from a couple of farm house yard lights, and a bit of residual sunset glow (at 10:30 pm).
5/6/05: This morning, when we started out in the Jeep, I discovered the right front tire was completely flat. We had planned to do another long day of exploring the back roads of the Grasslands, but that's not wise without a spare tire. So, change of plans: after changing the tire, we headed in to Greeley, half an hour away but probably the closest place to get the tire fixed (or get a new one if necessary). There's no obvious damage to the tire, so I don't know whether it's a puncture from yesterday's two-track driving and off-road driving, or damage from towing it with locked steering two days ago. If it's the latter, I'll have to assume that the other front tire may fail too.
At the eastern edge of Greeley, we parked, fired up the laptop and used the Yellow Pages add-in of Street Atlas Plus to list and locate the tire dealers. The first one we tried was only a few blocks away but seems to have moved or gone out of business. The second, Agland, was also fairly close and turned out to be a large Goodyear dealer - convenient if we have to replace the Goodyear tire. The leak turned out to be a neat puncture on the sidewall, just below the tread. I suspect a yucca leaf.
By the time we were ready to travel again, it was 11:30 AM. We decided to do our exploration trip anyway, with a somewhat different route. We headed north from Greeley, not realizing until we were almost to the Wyoming border and ready to turn east on a dirt road that we had forgotten to get gas and had only half a tank - not a lot of range in this gas-guzzling Jeep. There are no gas stations on highway 85 from Greeley to the Wyoming border. So we continued on to Cheyenne and found a gas station in the outskirts of town, then decided to approach our destination, the Chalk Bluffs, from the Wyoming side. We drove east on narrow country roads, generally unpaved, for 25 miles or so, paralleling the cliffs, which were visible a few miles south of us, without finding any access. We followed one promising road a mile or two toward the cliffs and found ourselves driving right through the middle of a ranch yard, littered with bits and pieces of new and old equipment, huge piles of hay bales, old cars, and then a feed lot littered with fresh manure. No gates - just cattle guards. After another half mile, the road was blocked at another ranch, with a locked gate and a no trespassing sign.
Eventually, at the tiny hamlet of Carpenter, we came to a road that continued south, through a break in the bluffs and back into Colorado where we turned west and drove along the south edge of the bluffs, still a mile or two away, and still without finding any access - not even a hiking trail. At the end of one numbered Forest Service two-track, we did find an official playground for off-highway vehicles - a little canyon sand and eroded sandstone. It was a bit rough for our stock Jeep, but it was closed anyway - for some reason it's open only November through April. Anyway, it was a nice spot to get a view of the bluffs to the north, and walk the grasslands looking at interesting rocks and ground-hugging wildflowers.
At this point, we'd used up most of the afternoon, and started picking our way back trough a maze of zigzag dirt roads to our campground. The dust from these dirt roads is incredibly pervasive, even though it rained just a couple of days ago. The car is covered inside and out. Don't know how it's getting into the car, but every surface is dusty.
Far to the south, looking like it was right over our campground, a huge thunderstorm looked ominous. But we got back ahead of the slow-moving storm, and it passed somewhat south of the campground anyway - we got only moderate rain and none of the lightning. At one point late in the evening, we could see the distant lightning of three separate storms, to the north, south, and east of us. No star watching tonight. At dusk, we heard, but didn't see a nearby coyote pack.
5/7/05: Time to head for home. Instead of retracing our route via US-85, we went almost straight south, taking CR-49 all the way down to I-76, then following I-76 and I-70 back home. CR-49, although narrow, was smooth and had almost no traffic - a fast route. Other than a long delay to get through a construction area on I-76 near Commerce City, the trip home was uneventful. We traveled about 200 miles in the Motorhome, and another 200 miles in the jeep.