Flaming Gorge - Day 2

Thursday, Sept. 23 - I got up early this morning, and watched 26 antelope from my kitchen window go down to the river to get a drink.  This is a pretty nice campsite.

I took some pictures of the sunrise for Joe, since he never gets up early enough to see that.  You can even see some antelope in this picture.
 
As the sun started hitting the mountains across the river, I took some pictures of that too.

This campground has wind shelters at every space, and you can see them here with the moon setting.

Once I got Joe on the move, and fed, we explored this area today in the car.  There was a little snow on the mountaintops that probably came down last night, since we had a little rain at the campground.  We took a loop road through Sheep Creek Canyon and Geological Area, where a lot of the rock formations date back millions of years.


 

We kept looking for bighorn sheep, but never saw any on this look.  We drove on toward the Flaming Gorge Dam and saw some beautiful views of the river. From the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, water flows via the Green River to the Colorado River and eventually ends up in Lake Powell.  The dam is 502 feet high and contains 987,000 cubic yards of concredte.  It was completed in 1964.  We took a tour of the dam.  This area including the dam and bridge look a lot like the Roosevelt Lake area.


You could buy fish food and feed the fish on the river side of the dam, which created a feeding frenzy.  The fish hanging out here were pretty good sized, and they get fed several times a day from the tourists on these dam tours.
 


As we drove back toward camp, we took some side roads but never really scared up any wildlife.  Some of the roads were already closed for the season, and others were for "authorized personnel only."  I need to get Joe a t-shirt or baseball cap that says "Authorized Person" because he does NOT think any gates or roads should be unavailable to him.  He thinks he should be authorized for everything.We did come upon 3 wild turkeys (hens) just beside the road, so Joe made a U-turn and we got a picture of them. them.

As we drove back down through the canyon, we could see the "flaming" part of the name.  It was a very pretty drive, but you need to be on the water (which we weren't) to get the full effect of the colors of these cliffs.

As we drove into the road to our campground, we took another side road to another campground and found our new best friends, the antelope, grazing near the water.

We rested and read for a while at the RV, then Joe took me back to the little town of Manila (approx. 10 miles) for ice cream (yes, Dana, I got my ice cream tonight too).  We drove through the little town and checked out the gift stores and gas stations.  There was a deer grazing right in someone's yard, and we saw another deer beside the road on our way back; luckily, we saw it before it darted across the road.  The full moon was rising on this trip so, of course, we have pictures.