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Colorado's Roan Plateau A lot of Pics


legacymax
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This last saturday, my cousin and I went up on the Roan Plateau outside of Rifle Colorado. The Roan Plateau is also know as the Naval Oil Shale Reserve. 55,186 acres of the Plateau are going to be leased out for natural gas exploration on Aug 14th 2008. We thought we would go see it before the oil companies go in. I was very surprised when I went on top of the plateau as I was expecting a high mountain desert of sage and pinon pine. I was wrong.

We started in the town of Rifle at 95 degrees, rose 4000' within 9 miles (2000' of that in one 2.5 mile section of road) and dropped to 75 degrees. Once we got up there we saw high mountain meadows, aspen and pine forests, and wild flowers everywhere. Not what I expected. There weren't many people up there and most of the traffic we saw were oil workers using the roads to get to private land on top of the Plateau. We drove along the rim road taking has many of the little overgrown side road that we could. One of these road started to head into a canyon and then deadended. We got out of the car and went for hike which all we had to follow was game trails. We came across some cool waterfalls, forests and some stinging nettle.

 

I took a bunch of pictures so here they are.

 

The Colorado River 3 miles away and 4000' down

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The road getting up there.

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White Columbine

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our hike and Waterfalls

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My cave

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2ft diameter aspen tree. I saw the largest aspen trees I have ever seen on this hike.

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The hatch, stalking us.

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cliffs

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