Wednesday September 22, 2004

Rifle, CO to De Beque

I thought I was through with the mountains when we crossed Vail Pass. How naive was I? Very!

We're still 5,000 feet high and the mountains are still all around us. Fortunately we're going around them, not over.

Even so, the weather is wierd. Today I was caught in a storm (again). Icy rain. Once again a gale-force wind came out of nowhere and the temperature plummeted. In five minutes the weather changed from comfortable fall to freezing mid-winter. I was wearing shorts!. Boy, did I feel stupid.

But I had a t-shirt, flannel shirt and sweatjacket too. That still wasn't enough to keep me warm until I put on my little plastic raincoat. Those things are amazing. You'd never think they'd keep you as warm as they do.

The clouds were at once awesome and eerie. I'll write about it in next week's story (too late for this week.)