|
|
|
Undaunted
by my last visit to Flaming Gorge, I once again hooked the
boat up behind the big Dodge and headed in that direction to
meet my wife's brother and his wife who were flying in on
their way back to Colorado on Saturday morning of the weekend
after the 4th of July.
|
|
The local Manilla airport is easy to miss if you don't know
what you're looking for, but we had met them there before so
we had no excuse other than our own lateness when we rolled in
to find them snoozing on the ground in the shade of the tail
of their airplane. Without too much dawdling around, we
floated the boat and headed down the canyon. |
|
When spent the biggest part of the day lazing around on the
bottom end of the canyon, near the dam and such, when my wife
noticed that there appeared to be quite a few people starting
to set out chairs and stuff in the parking lot by the visitors
center on the dam. "I'll bet they're going to have
a fireworks show," she offered, "We should stop by
the Marina and ask someone." |
| Well,
sure enough, the good folks at the Cedar Springs Marina
informed us that, yes indeed, there was going to be a
fireworks display, beginning roughly at dark. We had
staked out a nice little cove up the canyon a ways, so we
headed back that way to get dinner inside us and to make sure
we had GPS landmarks set for camp so we could navigate back
easily in the dark after the show. One note here, it was
interesting to notice the difference between my Magellan GPS
and the Garmin model my brother-in-law uses in his
plane. My Magellan seemed to insist that all satellites
had been shot down or zapped by sunspots, while the Garmin
locked on and located itself almost immediately. I'm not
sure what the problem was with mine, but I wound up running
through the setup menu again, and plugging in the coordinates
of a stored landmark from a previous trip to the Gorge before
I could get it to lock on. Again, no explanation for
this, but maybe the years and the rough duty have finally
started to take it's toll on the Magellans'
"innards". |
|
Eventually, a couple of hours later, our bellies full of
dinner and our electronic gadgets duly setup, we headed back
down to the Cedar Springs area. It was already starting
to get dark as we rounded the bend, and what an incredible
sight it was to see the silhouette of the mountains with a bay
full of boat lights. We motored in close and took up a
spot that we hoped would offer good viewing. Before
long, all the really big boats from the Marina pulled out into
the bay for a parade of lights. My two girls loved the
parade, as did the growing crowd of boats. The weather
couldn't have been much better, the winds were mostly calm so
it didn't take much work to keep our position. Finally,
after a couple of laps around the bay, the parade boats all
took up positions in a large circle around the bay, and the
fireworks show started. The fireworks were being shot
from a barge that was floating in the middle of the bay, so
most of them were exploding basically right over our
heads. The thunderous booms echoed back and forth off
the canyon walls, and the overall affect was great! |
| All
too soon, the spectacular show was over and the time came to
head back to camp. The crowd dispersed much easier than
cars, with everyone sort of slowly motoring off in whatever
direction they needed to go, and before long we were mostly
alone, motoring gently back up the canyon toward camp.
Between two GPS's and a powerful handheld spotlight, we had no
real trouble finding camp, and before long we were all bedding
down for the night, happy and content. This trip was
much better than our last trip to Flaming Gorge, and as
enjoyable as the fireworks show was, we're pretty sure that
we'll be making it an annual event to spend the 4th of July at
the Gorge. |
| |
| |
|
-
Return to the top of this page - |
|
|
|
|
|
