The sign that greeted us when we first reached the Utah/Colorado border read: “Welcome to Colorful Colorado,” and initially we were quite confused. What was so colorful about Colorado? We would soon discover the answer to that question, as we encountered the colors of Colorado in a number of unexpected situations.
The Colorado welcome sign that we would later realize contained some serious foreshadowing…
Red
You might think that the red we saw in Colorado was contained in something like a beautiful sunset, or perhaps the slopes of majestic red rock that surrounded the road. You would be wrong in that assumption. Remember the cricket swarm I mentioned back in the Day 11 blog? Those guys were back, and with a burgundy, vengeance. For miles, the stretch of road before Helen and I was stained red by the remains of cricket swarms, both alive and dead.
Purple
So the Garmin device we use to navigate while on our route has a feature that tells you what kind of inclines you will encounter and how intense they will be. The steepness of a climb corresponds to a color, green being little to no incline, yellow being a moderate incline, and red being the steepest…. Or so we thought. Helen and I discovered today that there is a PURPLE indicator, meaning we encountered the steepest incline we’d ever faced.
Green
The red of the cricket swarm may have stuck out less if not for being adorned with a slight accent of green. As Helen and I sped down a hill, plowing through a congregation of crickets, we thought, “surely there is nothing worse than crickets?” We were wrong, there is something worse than crickets, and that’s crickets with a side of snake. A long, lanky, lime colored snake curled up on the road was our dose of green from Colorado, and the scream that erupted from Helen and I as we swerved to avoid it could have been heard from miles, I’m sure of it.
So indeed, Colorado did prove itself to be very colorful in the end, the welcome sign on the border is much less confusing now.
~ Jordan