More Great Autumn shots in Colorado

The last two days in the Colorado Rockies have been more of the same...fabulous!!  The area around Monarch Pass is especially flamboyant...as this shot shows.

The Lizards visited yet another major American river...the Arkansas.  Colorado is an unusual state where rivers are concerned.  There are no large, navigable rivers in the state, but there are several famous streams...the catch is that they all begin in Colorado and are thus small here, while becoming larger downstream.  The Colorado, Arkansas, Rio Grande, and Platte all start here and attain more major status downstream.

The mountainsides near Monarch are downright luminous!

Here's the sign at Monarch Pass...higher than the summit of Mount Hood, Oregon's tallest peak.

Our saurian vagabonds have now landed at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  This gorge is not nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon...about 2000 feet on average...but it is more precipitous.  In places it's barely a quarter mile wide.  The dark rock adds to a sense of foreboding.

The fissured rock at the Black Canyon has been penetrated by flows of other material, creating these seams.

Lightning caused fires have ravaged the P-J landscape at Black Canyon.  The gnarly dead trees add to the surreal vibe here.  The first time I visited was in the 1980s.  I camped on the north rim of the canyon, under a full moon.  An owl serenaded me all night long.  It was cool and more than a little mystical.

Monday night I stayed in Ouray.  Though I lived in the Denver area for 12 years, I only visited here once, then only briefly.  Hard to think of a town anywhere in a better setting.  I'll have to come back for several days.  For that matter, it's not all that far from Monterey either.

I had never been over the famed highway between Ouray and Silverton...till today.  The terrain in Southwestern Colorado just seems to be more dramatic than in the rest of the state, and that's saying something!  The mountains here are steeper, the valleys deeper.  And the fall colors are astounding!  I was one of the few casual photographers here...most of the folks had big SLRs and tripods. 

This could be an impressionist painting.