Colorado National Monument

The ski area closed on Sunday, so as soon as I finished wrapping up a few important things on Tuesday, I packed up and headed West again to try and get dry and warm in the desert for a few days.

I got a room in Fruita while I wait for a couple friends to come through town on Thursday and we will head on to Moab for some riding out there. When I woke up this morning, it was very rainy and it didn't look like there was much hope for it to dry up enough to get a ride in. I couldn't just lay around in the dumpy motel though, so I decided to get out the rain gear and head over to Colorado National Monument for a good hike.

I checked the map for a challenging route before deciding to drive over to the lower trailhead of Ute Canyon and the Liberty Cap trails for a possible big loop. The Ute Canyon trail was listed on the map as "unmaintained ," so I decided to head up that first in case it was difficult and slow-going. After immediately climbing up about 700', the trail calmed down and followed the dry creekbed deep into the impressive Ute Canyon.

Ute Canyon

The trail was in good shape the whole way so it wasn't long before I was climbing out the steep trail towards Rim Rock Drive. I reached the Rim after 5 miles and did another map check. 

My options were to turn around and head back out the same way, or to jog west an unknown number of miles to link up with the Upper Liberty Cap trailhead for a loop back down to the truck. I used my Snickers wrapper to scientifically measure the distance to the other trailhead, and I guesstimated it would be about 4 miles. Then it would be 7 miles back down the Liberty Cap trail for a total of about 16 miles. I felt good enough for that so I started slowly jogging down the road.

To my surprise, I reached the upper trailhead after exactly 3 miles, so it wasn't as far as I thought it would be.

The Upper Liberty Cap trail was "maintained" so it was wider and even easier to follow than the Ute Canyon trail. The first 5 miles were very gently rolling terrain that would take me to the ancient Liberty Cap before a steep plunge off the rim and back to the truck.

Along the way I got big views of Fruita off the the top:

I kept up the slow jogging all the way and made it to the Liberty Cap in quick time after 5 miles.

The hike down the cliffs from Liberty Cap was the most fun trail on the hike. The trail traversed back-and-forth along the cliff edges until it would find a narrow place to scoot down. My legs were getting pretty sore, so I dialed it back a bit, but I made it back down to the truck fine and took the pic below looking back up to the Liberty Cap.

I paced around the parking lot for about a minute until I could make the GPS read exactly 15 miles in 3 hours and 45 minutes total time. Looks like a total of about 2300' climbing.

That's the longest hike / jog I've done in a few months and my legs were pretty sore when I reached the motel. I took a solid 3-hour nap and they've loosened back up considerably. It never did rain during the hike, so maybe the bike trails are dried up enough for a ride in the morning. I'll be heading to Moab around 1pm so as long as it doesn't rain more tonight, I'll be packing out of the motel early and giving the Kokopelli singletrack another look.

Great hike / jog. Started the trip off with a solid workout.