Several miles south of our campsite in the Cibola wildlife refuge (according to the map) is Cibola Lake proper. It’s an odd place. I rode my trike down a road which, according to the map, runs right along the lake for miles (3? 5 maybe?) and saw…pretty much nothing. There was water all right: the Colorado River (which at that spot looks about as wild and river-like as the All American Canal). But where was the lake?

At the end of the road, I found an 'overlook’ of the lake, and the first photo below is the view from that overlook. Sluggish channels through the reeds. I guess that’s the lake. On the way out, I stopped at two parking areas labelled ‘Cibola Lake’ and realized that they were access points to the sluggish channels through the reeds for intrepid boaters desiring to fish the “lake”. They were both closed.

Now, if we left the overlook and looked south, we saw something that actually resembles a lake, but I could not find any road in, even a bad one. So boaters are confined to the marshy area.

At the end of the road, there was this cable car across the Colorado. I spent probably 20 minutes trying to figure out how it might work with only limited success. Most notably, I wondered what fail-safe mechanism there might be in case someone (just as an example) put their trike on the cable car and tried to cross the river on it, reached the middle of the river and discovered the teeny motor I heard running but could not find was incapable of pulling the car/rider/trike to the other side. As you can see, there’s a substantial dip in the middle of the cable, so getting back to shore is an uphill climb. Like, wasn’t there a rope one could pull on to manually haul oneself to one side or the other in case of emergency? Apparently not. I was unable to find any such thing. So I didn’t try riding the car (tempting as it was).