I won’t go into the rich history behind this family-oriented event, but instead focus on this years’ experience. If you are interested, the Mile Hi Jeep Club website has plenty of info on the event through the years:
http://www.MHJC.orgThis year my family unit was already in Denver, so it was up to me and the trusty wonder mutt to drive solo to Colorado, retrieve said familial unit, and get to base camp in Empire, CO for the first day of trail runs on Sunday, July 31st 2016. After a rushed couple evenings of prep after work, the motorhome and LJ were loaded up, washed up, and ready to hit the road:
We launched around 8:30pm on Wednesday night, letting the sun dip behind the horizon and cool off a few degrees. I drove until about 1:30am, making it to the East side of Boise, and filled up with fuel and found a quite parking lot to catch a couple hours of shut eye. Only slightly later Thursday morning, I was East bound and down watching the sun come up somewhere near Mountain Home, ID:
From there it was just a hop, skip, a jump to the Utah border:
Some interesting rock formations as you roll East out of the back side of Ogden, UT toward Wyoming:
If you have ever had the pleasure of driving I-80 across Wyoming, then you are undoubtedly familiar with the gentle breezes that the area is known for. I took a break at Little America for ice cream, and to let my forearms and biceps recover from sawing the steering wheel back and forth to combat those gentle breezes:
Central Wyoming also has some pretty cool rock features:
As the sun was setting Thursday evening, I had finally made the Colorado border on a beautiful stretch of lonely two lane highway (my apologies for the blurry pic, the conditions were not ideal):
I pulled over for the night sometime well after dark, on a random Forest Access road. When I woke up and headed out Friday morning, I quickly realized I had just spent the night quite literally on the Continental Divide:
The drive down toward Granby, CO in the wee morning hours was stunning:
Colorado, surprise surprise, is also chalk full of cool rock formations:
Just outside of Granby, there was a hot air balloon rally about to start:
And finally, sometime before lunch on Friday I arrived at the destination for the week, Empire, Colorado: