After having spent almost a year at the foot of the Monument I finally bought a park-pass and took a ride through the park. I went in the west entrance and gawked at some of the overlooks before I peeled off on one of the roads to Glade Park

I was surprised to discover that the Monument is just the north-facing cliff of a huge mesa that runs all the way south to highway 141. There isn’t a continuous road over to 141 that I could find, but the trees and creeks go all the way over

I ran out of road at the edge of the Grand Mesa National Forest mostly because the City of Fruita had dug a hole in the road to repair a water line

The mesa tops out around 9500 feet so it was nice and cool up there. The grass was still green and the wild flowers still had blooms on

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