Wednesday started out with a phone call from Dad letting us know that Mom's surgery had gone well, so that was great news to wake up to! We hadn't set alarms, so Dad's call actually kept us from missing breakfast! After finally getting everything together, we took off. I (Emily) drove 
from Grand Junction to Montrose where we restocked on food for the next three nights of camping. Steve took the road from Montrose to Ouray because it starts getting into the mountains. We stopped at a place called Box Canyon Falls that was beautiful. It looks like the river had carved out a path just wide enough for the water, so it was very narrow. A neat place though!
from Grand Junction to Montrose where we restocked on food for the next three nights of camping. Steve took the road from Montrose to Ouray because it starts getting into the mountains. We stopped at a place called Box Canyon Falls that was beautiful. It looks like the river had carved out a path just wide enough for the water, so it was very narrow. A neat place though!Our main destination for the day was Yankee Boy Basin, a open area in the middle of the mountains. It was a fairly long drive and much higher elevation, so the temperature cooled from about 90 degrees in Montrose to 72 degrees just by the time we started up on the 4x4 road. It did get rough at times, but Steve handled the roads very well and brought us and the Jeep back down unscathed! We got some video of the ride down that we'll post later.
The Basin was beautiful when we got up there, and we were the only ones up at the end of the road. We saw lots of marmots on the way up, and I had to chase them all over trying to get a picture. We also saw a small doe on the way back down that let me get pretty close to her before I finally left her alone. Steve also got a nice pic of a chipmunk that mysteriously disappeared right as he clicked the second picture.
We finally settled down at a campsite back toward the bottom of the road toward Ouray. It was pretty empty with just a few vehicles at the first few sites, and our spot was over a few little hills. For some reason, once we set up camp and it started getting dark, I was worried about bears. Really worried...I imagined all kinds of things coming at us from the darkness outside of the firelight. Well, things didn't take a good turn when Steve shined the flashlight around the perimeter in an attempt to make me feel better because the words that soon came from his mouth were, "I think I see eyes!" He started for the Jeep (about 100 yards away) to get his spotlight, and I was NOT going to be left there by myself, so I sprinted to the Jeep and jumped in the front seat. If there was something wild in the woods, I certainly wasn't going to be outside! Thankfully when he got the BIG light, we saw that it was just a deer. And I figured that if there was a deer, surely there wasn't a bear around or he would have eaten the deer! Ta da!
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