Into the mountains

Last weekend we took us for a trip up the Poudre Canyon. The Poudre (the way the locals say it sounds like poo-dah, rather like Aussies would say puta for computer but we discover that puta means something else in spanish... ho ho ho is a hint and I ain't talking Santa Claus here, so no more p*ta for us - how the heck were we to know since we don't speak Spanish? The Spanish poppulation of Oz is very small) is the local river. Wikipedia has very little to say about it. It is a wild river, at least at this stage of the year when the last of the melt is still filtering down.

We stopped at the first info place along the way. The info was not so interesting - watch out for ticks, welcome to the Poudre Canyon, etc. The info bay was very like a lot that we see in Oz, except with a GINORMOUS pothole that tried to eat our car. You guys in the USA like big things, doncha? ;-) One particularly interesting thing was this:

some sort of assassin bug. Yep, it has a victim. It's a bug eat bug world out there.

So we travelled on into the canyon. The hills around us started rising up

and we started seeing people on big inner tubes floating down the river.

We had to go through a tunnel

but be careful if you insist on having a rig that is more than 14'3" high!

and the hills kept rising up around us


The types of plants around changed a lot as we drove further up the canyon. It started off being arid type plants - scrubby grasses, not much in the way of shrubs or trees. Then we started getting what I presume are some sort of ponderosa pines and some prairie wildflowers




The Poudre had times when it was quite calm, though flowing swiftly, and times when it was quite quite excited:


We saw lots of white water rafting groups and some kayakers:



(Yes, he is going backwards at this point - he is effectively trying to paddle up stream. It didn't work. He ended up going over a small waterfall upside down and came up about 10 seconds later, going in the right direction this time...)

We kept climbing up and up. It became quite obvious what sort of valley we were driving in:

even though we have very few U-shaped valleys in Oz.

The park info centre, the one that is manned, was really good. We had a good chat with the people who are working there (as volunteers for the summer!). Some people love to talk to us about where we come from and we love to find out how they came to be where they are too. I think we spent most of an hour there. They also have only 4% sales tax, so I bought up big! LOL - 12 post cards and a little book to identify wildflowers. Plus they had the most civilised long drop dunnies I have ever seen - they even came with electric hand-driers and water! And loo paper too! Too much to expect! (I have seen at least two publications highlighting Colorado outhouses now, so I am glad to see that I am amongst friends here.)

I think I'll need the book for the wildflowers....


More soon!