Day Nineteen: Boulder to Green River, Utah

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We have now traveled into our eighth state!

We bid the Ruskins and Bella a fond farewell this morning, and headed back towards Golden, the only backtracking we have done on this trip. From Golden, we turned west towards home. The road over the Rockies was beautiful, with varied scenery. We saw active ski areas, impressive rock walls reaching high above us, and many mining towns. We were at over 11,000 feet at the highest pass!

One of the 6% downhill grades lasted for over six miles, and there were many warning signs for truckers and many runaway truck ramps along the highway.

We stopped to climb Dinosaur Hill, where an almost intact Brontosaurus was found in 1901.
Elmer Samuel Riggs (1869-1963) was a paleontologist who worked for the Field Museum in Chicago. In this area, he conducted digs at Riggs Hill in the Redlands and Dinosaur Hill in Fruita in 1901. After the dinosaur was excavated, it was taken by a horse-drawn wagon to the Grand (now Colorado) River and ferried across. Then the specimen was loaded onto a train and taken to Chicago, where it can still be seen today.

I learned that my tendency to speed wrecks havoc with the Tesla's estimation of when we need to charge! We were supposed to arrive in Green River for the night with about 14%!b(MISSING)attery left. (There is a supercharger here, which is why we are spending the night.) The speed limit in Utah is 80, and I was going a bit faster, until I noticed that we would have about 5%!l(MISSING)eft instead. I slowed down to 60 for the next hour and we made it to the charger with 9%!l(MISSING)eft! Lesson learned.

Green River is a bit grim. Our motel is clean and quiet at the moment, but shabby around the edges. We had a dust storm earlier that blew the outside chairs around the parking lot, but it's calmed down now. The town is known for its proximity the various outlaw hideouts around here and our motel is named the Robber's Roost.

The Robbers Roost was an outlaw hideout in southeastern Utah used mostly by Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang in the closing years of the Old West.

The hideout was considered ideal because of the rough terrain. It was easily defended, difficult to navigate into without detection, and excellent when the gang needed a month or longer to rest and lie low following a robbery. While hiding out at Robbers Roost, Elzy Lay and Butch Cassidy first formed the Wild Bunch gang. The Wild Bunch, early on led by Cassidy and his closest friend Elzy Lay, developed contacts inside Utah that gave them easy access to supplies of fresh horses and beef, most notably the ranch owned by outlaw sisters Ann Bassett and Josie Bassett. The gang constructed cabins inside Robbers Roost to help shield them from the harsh winters. There, they stored weapons, horses, chickens, and cattle.

Pursuing lawmen of the day never discovered the site of the hideout. The outlaws held each other to strict confidentiality regarding its location. Only five women are known to have ever been allowed inside Robbers Roost: Ann and Josie Bassett, the Sundance Kid's girlfriend Etta Place, one of Elzy Lay's girlfriends Maude Davis, and gang member Laura Bullion.

Charlie Siringo wrote that Robbers' Roost was "fifty miles east of Hanksville, where the 'Wild Bunch' used twenty-dollar gold pieces for poker chips." He goes on to write the Wild Bunch used Robbers' Roost as "headquarters for several years until Joe Bush and a posse of Salt Lake City officers made a raid on the 'Roost' and killed some of the gang." Wikipedia

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Photos

View from Dinosaur Hill in Fruita
The greyish area below are the tailing from the tunnel that was dug to remove the dinosaur.