It’s Autumn and Michele wanted to go to the mountains to see some Autumn color on our trip to Southeastern Utah. We started East through Park City before turning south towards Price with a side trip up a rural road to Rainbow Lake (at exactly 10,000 feet according to the USDA).
Utah is stunning but, having seen the Fall Color in the Northeast and Maine, we are spoiled. Here, the Fall Color is mostly only in a band from about 7500 feet to 8500 feet and, in New England there is no place at 8500 feet but the color is everywhere.
By the time we get to Price, we are out of color and almost out of light. We spend the night at an 196070s Ramada Inn that has been refurbished recently but still has what I would call merchant builder details like fluorescent lights in a dropped soffit over the bathroom washbasins and a recessed toilet paper holder. We ate in the hotel dinning room which featured steaks served on a sizzling platter another 60-70s touch. Michele and I split a small steak, a salad, and roasted cauliflower and it was delicious. Tomorrow our plan is to go to the local dinosaur museum, drive through Nine-Mile Canyon and the spend the night in Green River.
The stunning views in your photos seem to suggest another great pleasure: hardly any people. Wonderful!
The band of yellow is beautiful.
It’s all beautiful and this time of year is the beautifulest.
What’s the USDA doing giving out the elevations of lakes, anyway? Shouldn’t that be the purview of the USGS? I hope you checked your phones just to be sure…anyway, not the most spectacular fall foliage this year here in Colorado or, apparently, there; we never got a proper frost so, as you show, the aspens and poplars are making belated efforts but our usual scarlet oaks simply turned russet, faded to brown. Nonetheless, a sweet season…