Unicorns and Leprechauns

May 27, 2026  — Day 64

Rifle Gap State Park, Rifle CO

It is a bit of an embarrassment, but we both thought we were going to be camping in Rifle Falls State Park, not Rifle Gap State Park. And that’s ok, they’re just a few miles apart. Rifle Falls is really tiny and supposed to be hard to secure a site. So we were pleased when we made the reservation. Not that where we were was bad because it was spacious and had a great vista of the lake.

Doesn’t matter, we can still drive there. But, oh what’s going on here?

Water was pouring out from the center of the coach!

This is a problem. Part of the reason we’re here is to do laundry and part is to explore. We’d heard about a cool feature at the other state park just up the road. We assumed something to do with the gray water hose from the washer had failed. We’ve had other evidence of this. More than once we’ve found water on the bathroom floor right in front of the washer. It’s happened twice more on this trip. Water anywhere where it isn’t supposed to be, especially in an RV, is (to utter an understatement) a VeryBadThing™.

So what did we do? We hunted down the camp host, told him not to fret that it’s grey water and we’ll stop doing laundry. And it was off to see the wizard the falls!

But first, some fishies!

The falls did not disappoint. You have three separate falls and they were flowing wonderfully. This is Susan’s shot, hand held at 1/13th of a second. (susan here: dear readers, why yes, quite a lot of the images here are mine. Plus, I add a lot of “color” to the narrative. It’s always joint effort! <grin> This blog lives on his website because it was there. )

We climbed some rough stairs and you could get behind one of the falls!

And there were small caves to explore. Small caves.

We took a different path back to the car. We could hear birds that would be life listers. As usual they were quite elusive up there in the tree canopy.

Instead of going straight home, we visited a third nearby state park, Harvey Gap State Park. We passed these amazing views on the way to it.

Harvey’s water was just as beautiful. The park has no camping. It’s only used for boating, kayaking/paddleboarding, hunting/fishing only.

Back at the RV it was bad news. We found water still pouring out! Both of our minds raced to the worst possible conclusions.

This was disturbing. The laundry had been done for awhile. How will we fix this? How much will it cost? We still have weeks before we’ll be home! It’s easy to fix if you can find a shop you trust and throw money at them to fix it. That could be a lot of those “John Marshall bills“. Had there been a slow leak going for a while that’s been rotting the floor? Or is it new and an easy fix once you find the leak? We had no idea why this was happening.

We debated what to do. In a moment of clarity, Paul went inside to look at the control panel and then ran outside. He opened the grey water tank gate valve. Problem solved. We’d filled the gray water tank to beyond capacity and water was finding its way out. You see, for whatever reason when he hooked up the pipes here he emptied the black tank, closed the valve, emptied the grey tank, and closed that valve. Normally that’s ok but we’d been taking advantage of the endless hot water and sewer connection taking long showers plus doing a lot of laundry.

So, nothing was wrong. We still get water on the floor every so often and we don’t know why. We had someone spend hours trying to track that down to no avail. But it isn’t too much or too often. We suppose someday we’ll find whatever the problem is.

Paul then sat outside for a while and watched the swallows, uhhh, do adult things. Yes, he got “that” shot but let’s give the couple some privacy.

Paul was bothered by his waterfall photos. You see, he was shooting 2 – 3 second exposures, hand held, and it wasn’t working, which was strange since his 20 – 30 second astrophotography photos were fine. He checked and he had used a tripod for that. So he grabbed his tripod and headed back to Rifle Falls. It was only a few miles away.

He was not disappointed.

This shot is probably his favorite. Susan’s cousin Donna said, “Where are the unicorns?” Paul texted back, “The leprechauns were grooming them.”

Yes, they are very pretty, and we both can hear Paul’s gallery owner, Katherine Baltivik, cautioning him; “Pretty is a trap, Paul.” But pretty is so, well, pretty!

And to top it off, we had a great sunset.