Farewell, Invermin! So Long, Moab! Adios, Brodie the Dog!

Short Version:
Goodbye, Invermere friends! A Mexican feast, and one last Moab ride, complete with green cliffs, dino prints and lies about length. A red river, a horsefight, some pronghorns.

Long Version:
It was really rather sad saying goodbye to the Inverns, but we did so with high hopes of seeing at least some of them again, somewhere, sometime. And then we met Don and Christie at a Mexican restaurant called La Hacienda, where we set out to eat too much and achieved our goal with ease. Beans and cheese were coming out of our ears by the time we left, and it was a musical night in the tent, which we'd dried under the desert sun during the day while we were out riding, and finally actually got to sleep in again.

We enjoyed a leisurely morning in the sun, and eventually set off for one last ride with our neighbours; out along our road to the Klondike Bluffs trailhead, past greenish copper-laden cliffs capped with iron-rich red rock, and up onto the trail called Baby Steps, which proved, initially at least, to be a really fun climb up a mixture of dirt and grippy rock. We turned off onto the main Klondike Bluffs trail in search of dinosaur footprints, which we eventually found once Don stopped helping Christie navigate. They were very cool; huge, three-toed indentations in the rock, with a surprisingly strong sense of immense age.

Back onto Baby Steps, up under the eave of a huge, precariously-balanced rock, and away on a tight and twisting trail that was sometimes hard to follow, especially at speed. Both Nene and I missed corners, and were lucky to not wear cactus spikes as a result. We hit two major descents, separated by a fast section of the same dirt road that runs all the way in to Salt Valley in the Arches National Park, and a horrible climb made worse by repeated promises that we were nearly at the top.

And then we were riding out, past the green cliffs and along the dirt road back to camp, 3.5 hours and 30kms after we'd set out. Delicious beer punctuated our farewells to Don and Christie and Brodie the dog, and then we were off: up a gorge through which the Colorado River flowed red; past more strangely-shaped towers and plateaus; past a white horse and a brown, kicking and biting each other in a field full of flowers and unconcerned cows; past a herd of pronghorns near a dilapidated ghost-town called Cisco, whose falling-downness reminded us of Mexico; onto the Interstate; and eventually in to Fruita, where internets were stolen and the local dirtbag campspots located, out along the 18 Road at the foot of the mysteriously-named Bookcliffs.