Fall road trip: Telluride-Canyonlands-Park City

22 Nov Fall road trip: Telluride-Canyonlands-Park City

by Eliot Brown, photos by Mary Sama-Brown

[ed. note: Many of us remain in Telluride, not only for all our immediate area offers, but also for the infinite variety just across the hill. Eliot & Mary sampled that variety this Fall. This is Part 1 of their journey.]

I was yearning for a road trip.  My 95 Porsche 911 C4S was needing some exercise, as she was still feeling young with only 28,000 miles.  My wife Mary and I agreed that it was time to leave the airplane home and take a vacation from our air charter business, MayaAir, and from our doggies, especially Trasea’s five thirty AM wake up call. We spent several weeks planning our journey, which over ten days would take us from Telluride to as far north as Chico, Montana and back home.

The weather forecast was clear and sunny for our departure, Saturday, September 11th.  The two and one-half hour drive, through the La Sal mountains to Canyonlands in Moab, Utah was splendid with little or no traffic, as we expected, for this post-Labor Day tour. 

Canyonlands is vast, and we hardly did it justice with our five hour allotted time frame. We enjoyed dinner at the Sunset Grill in Moab, high on a hill overlooking the town.  The restaurant is located in the former home of 1950s Uranium King, Charlie Steen, who, with his uranium mine discovery, put Moab on the map.

Sunday morning, and another beautiful day, found us on the road at 9 AM for the four and one-half hour drive to visit our friends in Park City, Utah.  The route took us from I-70 at Green River, over Soldier Pass, through Provo, home to Brigham Young University, and finally through Heber City to our destination.  Our hostess, Barbara Wallack invited us for a hike up to the Deer Valley summit.

We enjoyed a home cooked dinner prepared by our host, Howard Wallack, while our conversation took us back to past times together, skiing at Mount Snow, Vermont with our young children.  An early bedtime was required by our anticipated long drive Monday morning to Yellowstone.

to be continued…