We started the day by driving to Mesa Verde National Park to explore some of the Native American ruins.
We had a couple options for our drive back to Salt Lake City. One option was to drive to Four Corners because Mindy hadn't been there yet, and then backtrack and head back to Salt Lake. Another option was to drive north from Cortez, visit Telluride (a place I have always wanted to see), and then drive back to Salt Lake. We chose the Telluride option.
And it was an excellent choice. The scenery along the drive to Telluride was both lush--with lots of trees--and rugged. Telluride itself was a beautiful place, which I had heard before. The whole drive and the area around Telluride exceeded even my lofty expectations for its natural beauty.
To make things even better, on the drive back to Ridgway, a particularly perfect view of the Sneffels Range just blew us away. My view of the Colorado Rockies in general were of mountains much less rugged than their counterparts in the Tetons and even the Wasatch, but the Sneffels Range seems a worthy rival to at least the Wasatch and maybe even the Tetons. The sunset lighting probably helped enhance our perceptions.
We started the last leg of our 6-hour drive back to Salt Lake for good, finally, with only about 4 hours of the day left.
It was awesome to see fireworks in Grand Junction as we drove through. It was not awesome, however, when a Colorado State Patrol officer pulled me over only a couple exits on I-70 past Grand Junction because both of my tail lights were burned out.
The officer didn't give me a ticket, but he instructed me to get off the highway and fix the lights before I should continue our drive back to Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a store open this late on a federal holiday that had the type of light bulb I needed for my tail lights, so we were forced to spend the night at an overpriced La Quinta Inn for the night. It happens.