After the rest day in Las Vegas we started our next series of night runs. Lucky for us… Personally, I’d rather treat in a few hours of sleep and the inconvenience of night running for the boiling day time heat (110 F) in the Vegas area. On the first evening, we started out just outside of St. George and finished about three miles inside of Zion National Park, the next run took us past Bryce Canyon to the town of Escalante. While running at night we still managed to go on a few side trips, and were able to spend a few hours in Zion, Bryce Canyon, and outside of Escalante. The scenery in these parks is stunningly beautiful, and the whole route through the south west, including further into Utah and Colorado is probably the best of the whole journey so far. The route then continued past Escalante towards Lake Powell via the Burr Trail, a very scenic back country road, arrived at the Bullfrog State Park area for the ferry across Lake Powell. In the evening we made a short side tour to the National Bridges Monument, and after a short hike into one of the canyons got back on the road for our next night shift. The next day took us past Moab in Utah, and we used the chance for a hike into Arches National Park before heading out on our next run. The last part of the route out of Utah and into Colorado was a bit more interesting, since it involved about 11 miles of running on I-70 in the middle of the night. Although not very exciting, it still was pretty unique, and one more thing that is most likely not happening very often… Later that night, I run the last miles in Utah, and Paul then took the run across the Colorado boarder in our last run before changing to the 3 am shift. At the first exchange point in Colorado we met runners from the Denver running club who were going to run with us as guest runners all the way through Colorado to the border of Kansas.

We spent the remainder of the morning in Grand Junction resting and, for the rest of the day, traveled all the way to Golden, just outside of Denver. Virginia was visiting, and we both hadn’t been out in the mountains for quite some time. So we took the opportunity to stop in Breckenridge, and decided to get out on a trail for the rest of the afternoon. As a former Colorado resident I’ve been out in the mountains many times before, and the chance to get back out for a few hours was tempting. The weather was reasonable, and soon we were heading up towards Quandary Peak. It was an awesome hike in the late afternoon, and we got to the 14,270 ft summit after 6 pm, just before sun set. The evening was quiet and calm, and after placing some BPR stickers on the summit register we returned to the trail head and later concluded the evening with a nice (but expensive…) dinner in Breckenridge. Later we continued on to Golden, and arrived there shortly before midnight. The night was going to be short, and early next morning at 5 am Laurel and I were heading into Denver for a 2 1⁄2 min spot live TV on the NBC morning show. The remainder of the day we spent resting and preparing for our next series of 3 am shifts (which are my least favorable ones…). The coming days were finally going to take us past Denver, into eastern Colorado and across the border to Kansas.