IntrepidXJ's Adventure Blog

I was looking for something to do today and decided to head out on a short hike this afternoon in the Colorado National Monument. I have never done any of the short hikes near the Visitor’s Center, so I figured I’d check out the two short hikes near there. First I started out on the Canyon Rim trail which follows above Wedding Canyon and ends at the Book Cliff overlook.

Above Wedding Canyon

After checking out the views as the Book Cliff viewpoint, I headed over to Window Rock

I guess they don’t want anyone climbing on it…

View into Monument Canyon

It was a nice hike and I managed to get out of the house for a little while and get some exercise…so it was a pretty good day 🙂

Amanda and I went for a hike to the Mica Mine today so I ended up bringing my camera along. Here’s a few pictures I took. I played with them in Photomatix first 😉

Wow, been a while since I posted anything, guess I’ve been slacking the last few weeks since I haven’t gone anywhere fun. Hopefully that will be changing soon. Anyways, on Tuesday Amanda and I went for a hike near our house along the Colorado River to a pedestrian bridge. We waiting until the evening when it cooled down a bit, so we got to see the sunset over the river, too.

Here’s a few pictures.

Bridge over the Colorado

Sunset over the river, monument and Grand Junction

After work today, Amanda and I headed out for a short hike, since it has been a whole week since we last did any hiking. Went over to Riggs Hill, which is only a few miles from our house. This hill was named after Elmer Riggs from the Chicago Field Museum and was the site of the very first dinosaur excavation in Western Colorado. Here he found the first fossils of the Brachiosaurus in 1900. There is now a cast of some bones along the trail where this discovery was made.

Here’s a few pictures from the hike.

Cast of the bones

Parts of the trail

It was a good quick hike.

Amanda wanted to head back up to try and find the Mica Mine that we couldn’t find on Monday. Lucky for us, we did find it today. We had taken a wrong turn on Monday which led us up and out of the canyon.

After finding the mine and exploring it a bit, we continued on to the end of the trail where we found a cool waterfall.

Here’s some pictures from our hike.