
Fruita 4: Wrapping-Up August 2020
Crag Crest Trail
By mid-May, after arriving at 4,500’ elevation Fruita, Colorado 6 weeks earlier in snow, the persistent heat compelled us to limit our hiking to the 2 highest trails in the nearby Colorado National Monument (CNM). It wasn’t any cooler 2,000’ higher at 8 am than on the lower trails, but the upper reaches didn’t heat as quickly and were more open to refreshing winds. We’d held-off on devoting about 2½ hours to the round trip drive to the Mesa, the go-to place to be cooler, until July. It was part of my strategy for pacing ourselves for a possible 6 month stay in Fruita: I didn’t want to race through all of the best venues.
One of my secondary concerns about relocating from Fruita to the mountains for the summer, aside from getting kicked out if the coronavirus infection rate in the villages rose, was the lack of trails. I’d quickly decided that Fruita hosted the highest density of moderate to long-distance hikes with great visual interest of any place we’d been in the US or Europe and that we’d likely lose that diversity in the mountains.
Our first visit to the 11,000’ Mesa confirmed my fear about the mountains: there was really only 1 good trail for us, Crag Crest. It was a 10.7 mile loop with only about 1,500’ of gain, but it was delightfully scenic. The literal and figurative high point was the almost 2 mile-long traverse on the narrow ridge of volcanic rock. Finger lakes below and grand panoramas all around added interest to the challenging trail. Other Mesa trails were largely flat forest walks with hungry mosquito escorts. A month after we started our weekly trips to the Mesa, I happened upon ancient electronic notes of mine noting a half dozen “must do” hikes in the West and Crag Crest was on the list.
Crag Crest Trail
By mid-May, after arriving at 4,500’ elevation Fruita, Colorado 6 weeks earlier in snow, the persistent heat compelled us to limit our hiking to the 2 highest trails in the nearby Colorado National Monument (CNM). It wasn’t any cooler 2,000’ higher at 8 am than on the lower trails, but the upper reaches didn’t heat as quickly and were more open to refreshing winds. We’d held-off on devoting about 2½ hours to the round trip drive to the Mesa, the go-to place to be cooler, until July. It was part of my strategy for pacing ourselves for a possible 6 month stay in Fruita: I didn’t want to race through all of the best venues.
One of my secondary concerns about relocating from Fruita to the mountains for the summer, aside from getting kicked out if the coronavirus infection rate in the villages rose, was the lack of trails. I’d quickly decided that Fruita hosted the highest density of moderate to long-distance hikes with great visual interest of any place we’d been in the US or Europe and that we’d likely lose that diversity in the mountains.
Our first visit to the 11,000’ Mesa confirmed my fear about the mountains: there was really only 1 good trail for us, Crag Crest. It was a 10.7 mile loop with only about 1,500’ of gain, but it was delightfully scenic. The literal and figurative high point was the almost 2 mile-long traverse on the narrow ridge of volcanic rock. Finger lakes below and grand panoramas all around added interest to the challenging trail. Other Mesa trails were largely flat forest walks with hungry mosquito escorts. A month after we started our weekly trips to the Mesa, I happened upon ancient electronic notes of mine noting a half dozen “must do” hikes in the West and Crag Crest was on the list.

On the volcanic ridge of Crag Crest.
After several difficult days on that high trail, he finally learned that he needed to take 2 tablets every 3 hours to maintain his tempo and be even better about his hydration. He bravely chalked up his misery to a good learning experience because we’d never been at that elevation for 7 hours at a time before. Some years, none of our hikes take us that high for even a moment. Another little lesson to take with us from our time in the pandemic.
These hikes were a stretch for me for a different reason. My persistent buttock muscle pain had us doing shorter hikes at a slower pace for months and I dropped about 1/3 of my usual pack weight to survive. Fortunately, by July, I was making some inroads into this pain issue and I managed to carry the additional weight needed to have lunch, rain gear, and a warm jacket for this longer, more exposed hike.
Not long after we started making these weekly Crag Crest hikes on the Mesa, I dared to look at our calendar and realized that it was time to train for being the the Grand Canyon. We had 10 weeks to recondition to our annual target of 20 miles with 5,000’ of gain while carrying 20 pounds. The gain wasn’t going to happen: no trail in striking distance of us had much more than 1,500-2,000’ of gain, but we could push-up the distance and weight.
The Deep Dive
Finally, in early August, I was caught-up enough with my self-regenerating To Do list that I steeled myself to take the deep dive into my most dreaded project, a project that I’d reluctantly consigned to the “Not in this lifetime” list, which was reorganizing my electronic files. I’d cautiously started exploiting my sense of having enough time for low-priority undertakings by mending the holes in 10 hiking socks that had neatly been made by my upturned big toes—Superglue did the trick on the corresponding holes in my shoes. There was still available time after this little test project, so I held my breath and confronted the tangled mess, my electronic files.

The Mesa Top Trail.
Once we were on the road, I spent hours sitting on the floors of the grand ancient history museums in Athens and Istanbul, thumbs flying, while I began writing our personalized version of the history of the ancient western world. We were both science majors and cultures like the Mycenaeans and Assyrians had no slots in our memory banks. We were starting from scratch. This history folder now contains notes on over 500 topics, most of which were entered on a thumb board. Including this massive history segment, I currently have 22 folders with from 40 to 1500 KB stashed in each of them.
The Palm Pilot with its thumb board was the perfect product at the perfect time for our bold new life as almost full time international travelers. There was one compact place for all of our essential information: prescriptions, sizes in specific brands, birthdates, safe deposit box numbers and where the keys were hidden, my age when I had measles, recipes, when and where the first glass beads were made, and on and on.
You could ask me almost anything that pertained to us or what we’d recently learned, and I had it recorded. The only problem was that my database had grown and grown and had been managed on a number of devices and with several different software programs over the years and had become unwieldy. Out of desperation, I started new files because the old ones were too jumbled, so my delightful details became difficult to locate. And, somewhere along the line, the Search function in the current software disappeared and still hasn’t been rehabilitated. My treasured archives were increasing unusable.
This intimidating project of reorganizing my digital files that I had postponed for years proved to be surprisingly affirming on several levels. The most obvious affirmation was regarding time, that I did have enough of it in this lifetime to tidy up my messes, even the monstrously large, low-priority ones like these files. The other obvious gain was the product—that I once again would have ready access to all of my prized information.
The unexpected validation was that my executive functioning, which had been under siege for too many years by maladies and medications, was returning. For years, Bill would kindly do the problem-solving around a project such as this and then I would do the ‘monkey-work’. Poor memory, logical thinking in disarray, and frustration intolerance incapacitated me in waves, making it impossible for me to pursue complex projects. But much to my delight, I had mentally recovered enough that I could succeed with this undertaking that required, among other things, discovering by trial and error how the slightly deeper levels of the software worked.

It was too warm for a rain jacket but it defeated the Mesa mosquitoes.
While customizing a strategy and categories for each of these 3 huge folders, I could feel my brain working differently, working better. I rejoiced at not getting confused, which had been so typical for too many years when doing difficult things. I savored the calmness that I was able to maintain when I encountered obstacles instead of slipping into too-familiar agitation. I was able to structure my approach to the project each day so as not to provoke frustration. I delighted in my accomplishments of conquering my monster files, my effective mental rehabilitation exercise, and of not having to recruit Bill to clean up a disaster of my making. I was a real hunker-downer now, I was doing big projects, not just routine chores.
Pine Gulch Wildfire
A week after the nearby Pine Gulch Wildfire was ignited by lightening on July 31, Denver friends with a holiday apartment in the Rockies 150 miles east of us, aborted their weekend stay when they awoke to heavy smoke from the fire. In contrast, we were 20 miles south of the same fire and on the same day, made our weekly bike ride with only a little, brief irritation from the smoke. It was all about the winds. The winds that whipped-up the fire on tinder-dry range land; winds that dictated who could safely and comfortably exert outside and who could not; winds that would fill or clear the Grand Valley with smoke before our eyes.

From our favorite trail in the Monument.
Watching the spectacle created by the smoke plumes was like watching dolphins or whales in the sea—you never knew what was going to appear next or where. We’d be walking on our trail, look out, and not see any evidence of the fires. If you didn’t know, you’d think there were only clouds above the Book Cliffs 10 miles away. A few minutes later and our juniper and pinyon pine scrub would open enough for us to see twin, volcanic-eruption-like plumes towering overhead. A few minutes after that, the winds would have strengthened and the giant plumes would have flattened like the smoke from a racing locomotive.
I insisted that we stop to stare at the now multiple fires near the end of a hike when we were weary and heat-stressed because I couldn’t simultaneously process what I was seeing and keep from stumbling on the coarse trail surface. The Grand Valley had largely been smoke-free that morning but it had filled with smoke during the “out” portion of our “out and back” hike. But something strange was going on with the winds: smoke from the 2 largest plumes was heading east and a bit north, away from us and the settled smoke in the valley was rapidly heading west through the valley. Structures and pasture land that were approximately 5 miles away from us were successively obscured by the smoke and then came into view in the traveling wave of dense smoke. In a minute or 2 the feature that you had been looking at could be obscured by the smoke or more fully revealed by the smoke’s sudden absence. It was like watching a sleight-of-hand performance.
We renewed our relationship with an air quality app to both understand what was happening in the region and to gamble with our lung health on outdoor exercise. Amazingly, there was a boundary line for the smoke down the valley, of which we were on one side. The I-70 freeway and the Colorado River ran parallel to each other close to our southern side of the valley west of Grand Junction, which made them easy reference points for assessing the edge of the smoke bank. Little green, yellow, orange, and red dots corresponded with seemingly unit-less numbers, “US AQI”, that go from 0 to 900+ on the app. Usually there were little green “go” dots on our side of these 2 lines.
When the winds were just right 10 days after the fire started, we paused on the trail to study the extent to which the newest cluster of more westward fires had grown. One of 3 or more fires was on our side of the Book Cliffs and was quickly traveling down the slope and broadening on its way towards us. We were also stunned to count a half dozen miniature plumes on the upper edge of the face beneath the smoke bank of the main fire. Minutes later and yet another shift in the wind, they disappeared from sight. We never saw flames, only smoke, but the movement of the smoke told an astonishing story even though we were never in danger.

Whoa! The plumes had that volcanic look.
It was on the 15th day of the wildfire that we first experienced fine ash settling out of the sky onto us and our trailer. Luckily, the prediction for worsening air quality conditions had resulted in us doing our weekly bike ride a day early and making ‘ash day’ a truly stay-at-home day. The 100° temperatures persisted under the peculiar yellow skies. Our luck with the wildfire smoke had run out.
Shut-In!
Limply, I conceded defeat. Like so many authentic pandemic hunker-downers, I finally committed to staying indoors 24/7, but not to stay safe from the virus. My undoing wasn’t infection avoidance but was the pile-on from the loss of the local southerly winds that had spared us from the worst of the Pine Gulch wildfire smoke and then, the smoke from some of the over 600 California wildfires drifting over us on their way east to Denver.
I was flattened by the overloading effect of microscopic smoke particles in my hyper-responsive lungs that I inhaled indoors or out. According to the EPA, being indoors (in a house, not a trailer) generally only decreases the smoke burden by about 1/3 compared with being outdoors, but I desperately needed every bit of relief. Exerting, even indoors in our little trailer, was out of the question.
We had been grateful for our good fortune the first 2 weeks of the Pine Gulch fire. At the base of the Colorado National Monument, we had been in a narrow strip of rarefied air. We could hike and bike everyday and could track the spread of the smoke on the distant plateau from choice vantage points in the Monument. Then the winds shifted, intermittently bringing snowflake-like bits of wood ash to our door. With determination and gratitude, we committed ourselves to doing longer and fewer hikes per week on the distant Mesa, which worked for all of 2 days. The 2 ½ hours of round-trip driving extracted us from the smoke to do these big hikes.
On Wednesday, the 3rd of the 3 hikes for the week, the smoke and a few flecks of ash caught-up with us, even on the most distant trailhead on the Mesa. My sensitive lungs reacted, putting me into the joyless ‘press-on regardless’ mode. About half way to our turn-around, the smoke thinned and my lungs largely recovered during lunch. We however were horrified about an hour into our return when we realized how quickly the encroaching smoke had engulfed our 11,000’+ volcanic ridge. All of my respiratory gains at lunch were lost and I struggled to get off the trail.

Four more miles to the truck; our lungs didn’t have a chance.
A few days latter, the air quality forecast for our Saturday bike ride in the CNM was looking promising but when we awoke at 5 am that day, it was a non-starter: the air was terrible, little red dots all over the map. We packed for hiking and headed southeast to Ouray on the edge of the Rockies, hoping for the return of our generally good luck this summer.
Ouray
The panic of being enveloped in wildfire smoke in Fruita, possibly for another month, was receding after I secured an overpriced RV slot for us in Albuquerque, NM in a week but then Bill said “But we didn’t get to see Colorado.” He was right, the pandemic, then the heat, had squelched the day trips we’d hoped to take while in western Colorado. My quick retort of “Let’s go to Ouray on Saturday” was conciliatory. Saturday’s were our biking day but there would be no last bike ride in the Monument because of the heavy smoke and Ouray, more to our south than the Mesa, looked to be out of the line of the air pollution.
Bonnie, a buddy from the California desert hiking club, had kindly sent us information about Ouray, the “Switzerland of America,” when she knew we were heading to Colorado instead of Italy for the summer. It had been at the top of our list of sites to see, places to go, in Colorado. We’d considered parking our trailer there for an extended stay but the shortage of grocery stores deterred us and then they literally pulled their welcome mat out from under visitors because of the pandemic.
Ouray was indeed a worthy destination. The mega-gentrified, old mining town that is noted for its National Historic District, beckoned one to stop and day-trippers did in droves. They had gotten it just right: freshly painted, totally refurbished, with lots of colors, shapes, and flowers. It was all class and no kitsch, at least when seen from the street. We had our hearts set on a trailhead and it felt like we were among the few who could successfully resist the allure of the delightfully festive main street.

An old mining operation at Ouray in the smoke-filled gorge.
Crestfallen at the almost certain loss of the day’s stunning Bear Creek hike, we elected to press-on by driving another 10+ miles to the 11,000’ Red Mountain pass to see what there was to see. Any hopes of escaping the smoke at those heights quickly evaporated but the visible mining history of this steep, narrow gorge was fascinating to see.
The mustard-colored creek bed without any vegetation was both eye-catching and disturbing: it likely was too toxic from mining operations that began in the late 1800s for anything to grow. In the opposite direction, a roadside sign explained a contradiction: the abandoned mining buildings with what looked like well maintained dirt roads. We had guessed it was the plethora of ATVs and other off road vehicles that were keeping the scrub from over growing it but the track was clear because the reclamation project begun in 1980 demanded intact roads.
The dramatic, deep, mile-long gorge was captivating with the peaks on one side reminding us of the Austrian Alps. An old mining sluice that was literally chopped-off at the road’s edge above the level of our heads added to the sense that “It wasn’t that long ago” that this was a rough and tumble place instead of a trendy holiday destination.
Ouray felt like a winter sport venue but with no ski slopes or lifts in sight, it took a little research to discover its secret: Ouray has an ice park and is considered to have some of the best ice climbing in the world. We totally missed it on our drive through; perhaps the water fall is dry in the summer, but online photos show it being right on the highway, RIGHT on the highway.
Breathing
With eyes stinging and my chest congested from being in the smoke for the 5 hours we were in the truck, we returned from Ouray to our trailer in the 100° heat. Unlike the hiking days when we actually hit the trails, we weren’t drenched in sweat and weren’t shaking dust and grit out of our shoes and socks. No miles would be recorded or elevation gain noted on our activities database but now we knew for ourselves what the buzz was about Ouray. The Bear Creek trail would be noted for our next visit to western Colorado, perhaps next spring.
Even with spending the day in the truck and trailer, I was feeling limp and drained from the effect on my lungs of 4 days in the smoke. At 7:30 that evening, when we should have been preparing for bed, we were surfing in search of an air purifier to buy in the next hour. I was struggling to control my growing sense of panic—I now knew there was no where I could go to breath comfortably, perhaps for hundreds of miles. Saturday night is a terrible time to shop and, since we were planning on hitting the road for Albuquerque on Wednesday, online ordering was out.

Pretty but….
I had partially recovered by morning with the purifier running all night and gradually improved to the point of feeling perky by late morning. Inexplicably, I tanked again in the early afternoon. Imperfect, but the prospect of being a shut-in for 3 full days was now more tolerable. I had rallied my will to ‘press-on regardless’ on the trail; now I would rally my will to ‘press-on regardless’ in stillness.
With luck, we’d never need to use this too-bulky-for-a-trailer, floor model, purifier again but, just in case, Bill added an air quality monitor to our shopping cart for a shipment to be received early in our stay in Albuquerque. I would feel empowered by tagging a number to my uncomfortable lung and body sensations with the help of this monitor and comparing it with the outdoor numbers. But even without the benefit of numbers, I was later horrified to understand that it took 8 days of being completely out of the smoke-filled air for the inflammation in my lungs to clear enough to be able to again walk at a good clip.
Bill glumly announced “I’m not looking forward to spending another summer in the US,” which was in response to reports of a less optimistic date for the coronavirus vaccine. A high-end air purifier will need to be in our shopping cart if that was the case; he too was uncomfortable even with our filtered, indoor air and summer wildfires are a part of the new normal in the West.
Heading Out
It was sad to suddenly leave Fruita because we were slowly suffocating from the wildfire smoke after what had been a very successful, almost 5-month, hunker-down to skirt the pandemic. The infection rate in our Colorado county had remained under 2% for our entire stay and by September 1, they’d had only 5 deaths from the disease.
The low prevalence of the coronavirus was part of why we relocated to Fruita in early April, in addition to the Colorado governor allowing hiking and biking within a 10 mile range of home. We felt safer being being in western Colorado in our trailer than at home in our apartment in the NW while we honed our virus contamination-avoidance skills: making a mistake in Fruita likely wouldn’t matter.
It had been unseasonably, beastly, hot summer but we’d aggressively adapted so we could thrive. The heat was another layer added onto the pandemic that forced us to innovate and adapt over and over again but we did. We hope not to spend another summer in our trailer to feel safe from the virus, but we know how to do it and how to do it in the heat.
We’d visited the Colorado National Monument 5 years ago, which also contributed to our decision to tread water in Fruita for the summer. Only 2 miles up the road from our RV park, it held more opportunities than we’d discovered during that reconnaissance excursion, both for hiking and biking. We had tremendous variety in the hikes available to us. We actually left town wanting to do more there; it had been too hot for us to be on some of the trails for months and we hope to be there again in cooler weather. And we were extremely pleased not to encounter a single rattlesnake on the trail while in Colorado, though we saw 3 flattened ones on the road to and in the Monument.
It took some “grooming” to be treated with regard by the cowboys at the meat market I visited weekly, but I did begin hearing “We appreciate your business.” We didn’t develop any social relationships while in Fruita though had had 2 promising prospects from ‘on the trail’ encounters. COVID-19 was so socially isolating, we were disappointed that they didn’t materialize.
Our first choice for extracting ourselves from the wildfire smoke in Fruita was to relocate at Flagstaff, AZ. Only about 70 miles from the Grand Canyon and at the same 7,000’ elevation, it was a perfect fit. It was cooler and had clearer air than Fruita. Perfect, except that in high season, there were no RV slots available for more than a night or 2. Our second choice, Albuquerque, NM was only at 5,500’ and almost as hot as Fruita. There was also the threat of smoke from a new wildfire near Santa Fe. Cringing, I made a reservation for 3 weeks at the daily rate of $65 in Albuquerque.
We’d revisit the great, nearby trails in Albuquerque; delight in shopping at Trader Joe’s and Costco again; and be on our way to Flagstaff to enjoy the reservations I made there almost a year ago 3 weeks later. Then it would be on to the Grand Canyon.

Check-out Bill's first trail video! The worthy subject is of the Crag Crest Trail featured at the beginning of this file. This is a stunning trail, much of which is on a volcanic ridge on "The Mesa" in western Colorado. A little over 4 minutes, it goes too quickly. Fortunately, Bill showed restraint and trimmed it down from over 100 'takes'. He has yet to master audio production, but the audio will be added at a future date.