8/20
Here is a little known fact about Colorado: here grow some of the finest peaches ever. EVER. You
can take your Southern varieties, which are pretty good even when they get to
the grocery stores up north, and forget about it – these Colorado peaches are
enormous, juicy, and sweet. It is like
eating sunshine made solid. Our friend
and Colorado native Patty Gibbons introduced us to these wonderous orbs of
deliciousness, and now my dad sends us a box every year. But driving down I-70 in the Glenwood Canyon
we pass a truck advertising Palisades peaches going the other way and realize
that we are in the land. I resolve to
eat as many as possible during our time here.
Glenwood Springs has the world’s largest hot-spring-fed
swimming pool. It really is enormous,
and even when crowded on a hot early Saturday evening in August, has a serenity
that soothes the tired traveler. The
sides of the pool are crusted with weirdly smooth mineral buildup, and even the
“cool pool” is warm enough to relax you.
The water smells faintly of mineral and tastes salty and everyone just
sort of floats around looking very pleased with themselves. The hot pool is perfect bathtub
temperature. Peter is like a limp tea
bag upon exit but rallies for a similarly giant hamburger at the Pullman, where
I start my pursuit of all things CO peaches with peach and bourbon pork and a
peach pisco sour.
8/21
The venerable Hotel Colorado is, um, venerable. The lobby and public areas are marvelously
turn of the century, with giant round ottomans and enormous chandeliers and
various stuffed animals protruding from the walls. But the rooms are hot and dark and late at
night you can hear that lo-o-o-onsome whistle blow from the trains. It would have been romantic if I hadn’t
really wanted to just be asleep. Still,
it was the place to go, and many luminaries have visited the springs and the Hotel
Colorado – Al Capone, Diamond Jim Alterie, Tom Mix, Teddy Roosevelt, the Mayo
Brothers, William Howard Taft, etc.
Taft was asked if he’d like to take a dip in the hot springs, but
demurred, claiming that bathing in public was not his strong suit. He breakfasted on wild mountain trout and
raspberries. I hope his trout was better
than mine.
Out of Glenwood Springs, we opted for the scenic route to
Telluride (natch). This involves driving
up the Roaring Fork Valley, mountains closing in the sides, over McClure Pass,
down into the Paonia Valley, and then all of a sudden it is desert again at
Hotchkiss, then Delta and Montrose and back up into the mountains. It is pretty great scenery. Just after going over the pass (about 8700
feet) we passed a cyclist – riding up.
Incongruously, on the first edge of the desert part, we pass
the Hotchkiss National Fish Hatchery. Try
saying that five times fast. Try saying
it once.
8/22
I am still working the peach plan and so far I have
succeeded, having had them in dinner, cocktails, for breakfast, and of course
just plain. We stopped at the source,
Paonia, yesterday, and picked up an enormous bag with the vague idea of a tart
or ice cream or maybe just stuffing our faces with them out of hand. Man are they good.
We’ve never been to Telluride in the summer, so it is
different from ski-time yet oddly the same.
I confess that I find it just a little bit forlorn. It’s much quieter, although I’m told that is
not the case on a festival weekend. If
you live here year round, that is a good thing.
And we certainly don’t miss tilting with other tourists for a table or a
parking space. But the grass and weeds
just grow long and wild around the base of the lifts, and there are dirt roads
where work is being done on the mountains, and where some of the trails
are. It lacks the urgency and excitement
of lots of people stamping around on technical equipment, all pleased with
ourselves that we can conquer (so we think) some part of the mountain. That’s my take anyway. Isabel is mad she can’t ski, but otherwise
everyone else is enjoying it. We did
take a short hike down the Ridge Trail today, which was steep and rocky but in
the woods, and beautiful through an aspen grove. We passed people running the trail – up – and
were passed by people running down.
That’s just how it is in Colorado.
Here’s a great thing about out here: it stays dark well into the early morning
hours. At home, it would be getting
light now!
Here’s another thing going around town with my dad: he knows everyone. We stop or are stopped regularly by folks for
a chat. It is like Cheers except without
the booze.
8/23
The town of Telluride sits at the end of a box canyon, with
mountains on three sides. The only way
in is the road up the valley, and going back down the valley is the only way
out. OR IS IT? Everyone here knows that of course you can
just drive (or hike or run) up over those mountains at the end of Colorado Ave.
(the main drag), cresting passes at 13,100 feet, and drop down the other side
to Ouray or Ophir or wherever you’d like to go.
And of course the earliest residents knew that’s where the yellow rocks
are. They say that Indians (Utes, around
here) told the trappers tales of yellow rocks in the high mountains, but it
took awhile for anyone to figure out what that actually meant: gold, and also silver and copper and lead and
zinc and lots of nastier stuff, but a whole heck of a lot of the good
stuff. Once they did – hello Telluride,
the town was born to serve the mines way up in the very high mountain bowls, at
12,000 feet or so.
Today we took a tour up into those high bowls, all the way
to Imogene Pass, which is how you could go to Ouray (pronounced yoo-ray) if you
want. You don’t have to hire a guide but
you are wise to do so, and in his modified truck with essential 4-wheel drive,
he takes you on a four-hour butt-busting trip up up up the rocky bumpy narrow
slightly terrifying roads. You see bits
of abandoned mines, gorgeous wildflowers, some wildlife if you are lucky (us,
not so much, so marmots and a mule deer at a distance), amazing barren alpine
landscapes, and snow! And some ski
tracks, natch, from the aptly-named Lunar Cup that takes place way up high
every July. It is mostly a boozer, but
the tracks are still there.
They say that 400-500 men lived and worked the Smuggler
Union mine, and probably over a thousand were at the Tomboy mine, just up the
road. Smuggler sent their ore down
buckets to the Pandora Mill down by town, but the Tomboy was something of a
conglomerate – they had a mill and processing plant right up there, so several
mines sent their ore in, and it was turned into gold bars right there! Now it is all just some foundations and rusting
metal bits and wood and collapsed structures and rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Our guide Richard
showed us veins of gold and copper and malachite and lead still in the rocks,
splitting some open for us to see the sparkly bits.
We topped Imogene Pass at 13,114 feet and got out for a
look-see. It is pretty spectacular. Even higher, there is a teeny hut, which
marks the spot of the highest military installation in the lower 48. What up with that, you may ask. Well, back in the bad old days, the mine
workers in Telluride were not unionized, but those across the way in Ouray
were. So the latter tried to sneak over
regularly to harass the scabs at the Tomboy into unionizing. Needless to say, the mine bosses didn’t take
too kindly to this kind of interference, so they got the National Guard to haul
an 800 lb Gatling gun all the way up there, to keep those Ouray-ers in
line.
Here is an incomplete list of the wildflowers we saw:
Indian
Paintbrush (changes from red to yellow at maybe 11 or 12,000 feet)
Pink
Elephant Head
Fireweed
Tasselflower
Asters
Columbine
And the marvelously named Miner’s Sock, which smells like a
delicately perfumed version of Peter’s feet in the summer.
They say that there is still millions and millions of
dollars worth of gold and silver up in these mountains, but the grade is pretty
low, and the cost to extract it would far exceed the value of the metals
themselves. So, it all sits abandoned
now, save for reclamation projects to keep the nasty water with base minerals
from contaminating the local water supply.
It is marvelously lonely and romantic.
If you are really lucky, Richard will also show you where
the alien mothership landed.
8/24
Plenty of aliens in town so Bill and Peter complete the 4.8
mile hike up Bear Creek to the falls and back, and Peter does some bouldering
along the way. Izzy and I complete the
half-mile hike to Maggie’s for a blueberry muffin.
The town park in Telluride has a charming kids fishing pond
stocked with rainbow trout. Yesterday
Peter caught a ten-incher! Today he
takes me, and despite claiming no interest in fishing, and also no knowledge,
proceeds to give me Fishing Pole 101, along with lessons in baiting and
casting. I catch nothing except a
massive tangle with Izzy’s Sponge Bob Squarepants pole. She thinks fishing is great, however, and
wants to go every day. It kind of – but
not entirely – makes up for the lack of skiing.
8/25
There are at least two and probably more explanations for
the name of the Million Dollar Highway that runs between Ouray and
Silverton. The first is that it cost a
million dollars a mile to build. The
other one that we have heard is that there is a million dollars worth of gold
dust in the gravel in each mile of road bed.
Both may be right or wrong, but the views are possibly worth that much. You head out and up up up over the Red
Mountain Pass at over 11,000 feet and the Coal Bank Pass at 10,000 something. You pass many more decrepit old mining
installations, including the start of a five and a half mile tunnel through the mountains over to the
Pandora Mill at Telluride! Now that’s working your economies of scale.
Ouray calls itself the Switzerland of America. Ponder that but know that Ouray totally has
it going on compared to Silverton. I
don’t know what one does there when one gets off the charming narrow-gauge
railway from Durango, and has to wait two and a half hours for the train
back. There is about half an hour of
bummelling down the main drag, and that’s it.
Unless you have booked a mining tour, in which case you are
in for a treat. About five miles out of
town, past yet more forsaken mining installations, up a dirt road, you come to
the Old Hundred Gold Mine. Here a cast
of local large bearded characters take your considerable money, give you an itchy
raincoat and a hard hat, and herd you into a mining car which takes you about a
third of a mile into the mountain. It
really is cold (56 degrees) and wet (constant dripping). There, Joe admonishes you to hold your
questions until the end because he will probably answer them during the tour,
shows you drills and signals and blasting and moving equipment work, shows you
some ore, shows you the old miner headlamps that used calcium carbide, and
coolest of all shows you how the blasting worked. Joe is the real deal, and given the UMWA
stickers on his hardhat, you know that he’s been over there every night harassing
those scabs at the Tomboy. The Old
Hundred was first discovered by prospectors in the 1870s, and then mined until
1971. The miners worked ten-hour days,
but we stay underground for only about 45 minutes and that is enough. Afterwards, we pan for gold in some troughs,
but find only a couple of teeny copper pellets.
Some weather rolls in as we climb out of Silverton, and listening
to The Red-Headed Stranger adds to the melancholy as we crest moody mountain
passes in the rain. But the sun reappears
as our trusty Impala rolls into the comparatively bustling city of Durango, and
the elegance of our digs at the Hotel Strater do much to improve everyone’s
mood.
One sees Harley riders and groups everywhere Out West. They are usually older, mostly men but
occasionally women, and usually seem pretty well-off. They stay at the finest hotels, just like us,
and eat at all the swell joints. They
leave town early, with a rumble and roar.
The other thing one sees everywhere are serious
cyclists. Every mountain pass we crest,
no matter how high, on this entire trip, we spy some hardy soul pedaling up as
we zoom down.
8/26
Bill has been hearing the siren call of Mesa Verde since he
last visited in the 1970s, so our visit to the fabulous Hotel Strater is all
too short in my opinion, in order to get to that unique and extraordinary place. Basically, Mesa Verde is an area of ancient
cliff dwellings, of the native Americans formerly known as Anasazi but now
referred to as Ancestral Puebloans. They
lived there until the 1200s, and having left no written record, the big
question is of course, what happened to them?
Our enthusiastic Ranger guide Josh thinks it has something to do with
deforestation, or maybe it is drought, or overuse of resources, he is not
entirely clear on that point, but he’s great at taking us through Balcony
House, which involves climbing a three story ladder to get in, and squeezing
through a hip-busting (for me anyway) tunnel on the way out. Isabel led our whole group up two final ladders
and steep stone steps like a champ.
There was habitation in the area for over a thousand years,
as you can learn in the charming Civilian Conservation Corps-created dioramas
in the museum. (The Great Depression
stank for most people, but was a boon for the National Parks since it created
roads, structures, and interpretive sites at all kinds of places. Why the Sam Hill are we not doing this now?) First there were hunter-gatherers who
apparently hunted things that looked like wooly mammoths, then they moved into
cave shelters, then pit-houses, and then pretty sophisticated above-ground
dwellings. The earlier folk were known
as Basketmakers because they, well, made baskets, and then fine pottery comes
into play later. Finally, for the last
100 years or so of their existence here, the people moved into these fine
houses built under the overhanging cliffs up the canyons. They remind me of wasp nests, tucked up in
the sheltered place under the eaves.
Archeologists marvel at the construction: precise 90 degree angles, tight fittings, and
of course, many of these structures are still standing, 800 years later. Even the logs used to support and create
floorings are still there!
They say that the Utes always knew about the abandoned cliff
dwellings, but Anglos didn’t discover them until some cowboys who grazed their
cattle up on the mesa followed the canyons to find some lost cows, and stumbled
upon these houses, in the 1870s, although maybe prospectors had known before
that. Anyway, it was in the 1880s that
folk started actively searching for the cliff dwellings. In 1891, a Swedish archeologist named Gustaf
Nordenskiold carried out a major excavation, and his book on the project and
area is still considered an essential text for anyone studying this in any
detail. But he took about 600 items with
him when he left and they ended up in the National Museum in Helsinki! He was arrested in Durango, and they tried to
keep him from taking the stuff but the American Antiquities Act was not yet in
existence, so they couldn’t hold him. So
if you want to see the really good stuff from Mesa Verde, go to Finland.
In any case, the park was created in 1906, thanks largely to
the lobbying of Colorado women’s groups.
Score one for the ladies, and of course for TR, that champion of the
parks, since he signed the bill into law.
It’s not too crowded at MVNP but there are a lot of Germans
and Italians for some reason. Including
ein echt Deutsch Harley gruppe. Think it
is hot? “Polyester,” says our ranger
Josh, pointing to his shirt, “with a touch of wool,” pointing to his
pants. Oh for a buckskin thong.
Here’s a little known fact:
it is not actually a mesa, it is a questa. Something to do with the rounded top. Peter hates Mesa Verde National Park because
you have to drive forever (translation, half an hour) between the entrance and
the interesting stuff. But he also
pronounced it awesome. Want to bet which
memory will last? That’s why I love this
kid.
We overnight in Cortez, at a surprisingly comfortable Best
Western. These towns are kind of
depressing but there are a lot of great vintage neon signs.
8/27
Hurricane Irene be damned, we are heading into the
desert. There may be 8 inches of rain
coming to Cambridge, Massachusetts tomorrow but that is the entire annual
precipitation for Monument Valley, our destination today.
This is a big day for more learning about Indians. (Native Americans, Indians? Our half-Navajo guide in MV says Indians, so
I’m sticking with that.) The small but
excellent Anasazi Cultural Heritage Center near Cortez gives us more
information about the Ancestral Puebloans, as well as offering good background
on the archeologists who’ve worked the area.
There are also hands-on activities, including weaving, which I find
curiously soothing. Turns out that it
was man’s work for the APs, so I guess I am back to grinding corn.
PEACH STAND, must stop and stock up. Here we also sample some Colorado cheese
curds, which we can say definitively have nothing on curds from Wisconsin.
Leaving Cortez, you enter first a Ute reservation, and then
Navajoland, wherein lies the entrance to the must-see Four Corners. The guidebook remarks that however exciting
the concept of four states coming together in a single spot, one must be prepared
for the bleak reality. Indeed, it is
hot, barren, and the monument itself is surrounded by booths with Navajo
selling trinkets and fry bread, and bleak really is the word to describe it. Not much business today, so it is as vaguely
depressing as pretty much everything is in this part of Navajo territory. On our way to Kayenta, a charmless
crossroads that is the turnoff for Monument Valley, we pass the Red Mesa High
School, home of the Redskins. That is
just hard to figure out.
And now we are here, at the eponymous The View Hotel, and
boy does it live up to its name, as you will see in pictures. Dark red, and hugging the spur of a butte, it
occupies a prime viewing spot in the Valley, but does not overwhelm it. Since it is Navajo owned and operated, it can
do this – otherwise, access to the park is quite tightly controlled. You can drive a bumpy 17-mile loop on your
own, but if you are smart you will book a tour with a Navajo guide, as they are
the only folks who can go off the main road into less-visited parts of the
park. We spend three hours boinging
around the back of a truck driven by Shea, a handsome young Navajo-Irish man
taking a year off from college and helping his dad with the tour business. He’s a bit shy but very nice and shows us,
gosh, so many things: the Mittens, the
Merrick Butte (we can see these from our room), the Elephant, the Camel, the
Three Sisters, John Ford’s Point (a classic Western movies vista), the Sleeping
Dragon, the Sun’s Eye, the Ear of the Wind, the Big Hogan (that’s a traditional
Navajo lodging), the Totem Pole, the Dancers, and on and on. There are amazing acoustics, and a big sand
dune of the softest sand ever to climb up and run down.
The tour is heavy on the film references, because many of
the classic John Ford westerns were filmed here, and of course that has shaped
much of what people not from here know of the American West. But it is not just Westerns – we also see the
pit into which Harrison Ford was lowered in Raiders
of the Lost Ark (it is not really a pit, but a window), the rock that Tom
Cruise climbed for Mission Impossible
and the spire onto which that climb was superimposed to make it look more
dangerous. We see the Marlboro ad vista,
and John Ford’s point. We see the butte
onto which the Ford Motor Company lowered a truck for an ad, and on which
Metallica filmed a video. At each, we
say, cool.
The tour is totally worth the red dust everywhere and the
bruised butt that Peter got when he chose the really bumpy route.
For part of our tour, we followed a large, loud, cheerful
Italian group. Shea confirms that he
sees more Italians than anyone else. What
up with that? French is second, used to
be Japanese. Lots of Germans, too. We are only the third American group that he
has taken all summer, and he finds that leading tours is a good way to learn
some basics of many languages and how to work many cameras.
The fun doesn’t stop when the sun goes down because then the
hotel offers outdoor screenings of the film classics that were filmed right
here. We wonder how the Navajo owners of
the hotel and land feel about the bad-guy depiction of Indians in these films,
but I guess they feel that most people here are here because of the movies, not
because they are lovers of Navajo culture.
You could argue that the Navajo won – they have this magnificent
landscape, and are operating this successful business in it. And yet, it seems like a pocket of well-being
in an otherwise depressed existence. It
is pretty clear when you drive around this part of the world that the Indians
got a crappy deal even if it is ancestral land.
Later, the stars come out in a sparkling celestial blanket
above our heads, the night lit only by the occasional flashbulb from a
camera. There is the Milky Way! You can see the red taillights of cars
heading into the park to stargaze away from the hotel, and the white lights of
those coming back. It is silent, and
lovely.
But wait, there is more!
Because The View faces east (all Navajo dwellings face east, so the
residents can pray to the sunrise, in fact all of MV is considered a giant
hogan, facing east), we get up early to watch the sunrise. It is even better than the sunset, and if you
peer around your balcony, you can see others out all over the hotel, watching
quietly, or just the black snout of a telephoto lens, poised to capture the
scene. Only the soft click of a shutter
or a muttered comment about coffee breaks the stillness. Bill is one of those – he took close to 200
pictures on these two days alone.
As you can tell, Monument Valley made a big impression on
everyone.
8/29
We are apparently on the Western movie tour because the
other big Western movie location is here in Moab, including some classics
filmed at the very ranch where we are staying!
They have a museum here dedicated to movies filmed in Moab, and while
most are Westerns, there are also such classics as Thelma and Louise, and Back
to the Future III. Of course, the big stills on the walls are
of John Wayne in movies like Rio Grande
and Rio Conchos. We have purchased a DVD of Wagon Master, mostly because Isabel
liked the lady on the cover. She’s part
of a hootchie-cootchie show as it turns out, which so far has not required any
explanation but might soon.
Yesterday was a travel day from MV to Moab, with stops at
Gooseneck State Park (a view over a twisting part of the Colorado River,
cutting through desolate rock) and Newspaper Rock (ancient and more modern pictographs). The closer you get to Moab, the drier it
gets, and the hotter it gets until you descend the canyon on a road next to the
muddy brown Colorado River. The canyon
itself is like some entrance into hell:
steep sides of red red rock, and only a flash of green along the brown
river. Did I mention it is hot? There is NOTHING here. Then you round a bend about 14 miles in and
come upon a lush green ranch, which happens to be your lodgings, and that is
better, esp. because there is a cool pool, and horsies and your room looks
right onto a big bend of the Colorado River.
I am having a hard time warming up to Moab (despite the heat
which is about 95 as I write). I guess
there is the remnant of a social historian in me after all, because what
interests me about a place turns out to be the human overlay, I have a harder
time interesting myself in natural history.
Although it is pretty amazing in Arches National Park, where we went for
a drive and some short walks this morning.
We saw extraordinary stone formations and arches and it was all very red
and blue and dry. The boys took a late
afternoon hike up to Delicate Arch while we girls checked out the stable and
met Ding-Dong, Purdy, and Peanut, among other horsies, and swam some more and
hung out in the hot tub chatting with some guests.
In Moab, there are yet more foreigners – Italian, French,
and German, and Bill and Peter saw Brits and Japanese on their hike. How do they find their way to the Red Cliffs
Lodge? Who knows, but their presence here
reinforces two things for you: 1) how
there really is nothing like the American West anywhere else in the world, and
2) how pervasive pop culture, especially the movies, is in informing others’
worldviews about the US.
Our first night at the Red Cliffs Lodge we experienced about
a 4 hour blackout, and when we say black, we mean black because they say that
the RCL is at the end of the grid, there’s nothing past it. So that was an adventure because it is just
freakishly quiet here.
8/30
We thought we were at the end of the grid, but when you turn
left out of the RCL there is another lodge about five miles down the road! Maybe that is off-grid tourism.
Today was our big travel day. We drove about 315 miles from the Red Cliff
Lodge in Moab all the way to the Devil’s Thumb Ranch in Tabernash, following
the Colorado River much of the way. We
went from forbidding red cliff canyons into bleak desert, then slowly into
greener areas after Grand Junction. We
paused to take the waters (again) at Glenwood Springs, before heading back up
into the mountains. Did you know that
the stretch of I-70 around Vail is maintained by the Friends of John
Denver? More exciting, shortly after
cresting the Berthoud Pass at over 11,000 feet we saw a mama and baby moose by
the side of the road!
When you take driving trips with kids, you need to keep the
entertainment level in the car pretty high, and when the scenery is as
unrelenting as some of this desert, you’d better have some good tricks up your
sleeve. We have an iPod stocked with
singalong music (well, we make it singalong), everything from Johns (Cash to
Denver, have to have the Rocky Mountain High of course!) to the Beatles, some
native American flute music (how perfect for Monument Valley), Rome (an homage
to the Spaghetti Western from Danger Mouse with help from Nora Jones and Jack
White), lots of Willie Nelson and Hank Willians, and some Broadway for belting,
of course. We are also listening to the
trials of the Ingalls family on CD, whose tales of homesteading and life on the
South Dakota prairie work well with our own voyage of discovery. I’ll say this for the Ingalls: those girls really mind their parents. Perhaps Charles and Caroline could consider
publishing a parenting manual. It would
involve a lot of farm chores, that is for sure.
There are no foreigners at the Devil’s Thumb Ranch, but
there is pretty much everything else your heart could desire. It is all mountain luxe décor which means
very nice log cabins with geothermal radiant heat (you need it here after
dark), comfortable oversized furniture, and lots of stone and wood and
leather. There is an elegant pool, and a
spa which I must investigate. The beds
are enormous, and actually have feather beds on top of mattresses which is very
marvelous until you try to turn over and realize that you have been sucked in, like
into wet cement, and that you can’t actually move.
There is another blanket of stars here. How can there be so many in the sky? It is like being at the Planetarium, except
of course it is real.
8/31
I drink mostly coffee when I am in the West. This is partly because it makes me feel more
like a buckaroo, but mostly because it is actually very hard to get a good cup
of tea out here. And, the caffeine may
help the headaches that dog me at high altitude.
Today we really did have the Rocky Mountain High, with a
trip into Rocky Mountain National Park.
You just don’t appreciate the National Parks, even if you saw that Ken
Burns documentary, until you have been to some of these massive preserves out
in this part of the country. RMNP is
huge, and has a wonderfully well-maintained road that runs through it, all the
way up to 12,178 feet, and then down. Trite
as it is to say, you do feel that you are at the top of the world, and at the
Alpine Visitors Center (the highest visitors center in the National Parks
system) we see massive snow fields, tundra, and most exciting of all, far below
there are three elk, alternately jousting antlers with each other. We can see them quite well through
binoculars. Best of all, there is a flat
penny machine here, so the kids add to their collection.
Peter and Bill hike even higher, up to over 12,200 feet,
exploring the Tundra Communities Trail.
Isabel is felled by the wind, so she (we) naps in the car. What Peter really likes to do is find the
highest, most precarious rock he can, and climb up and perch on it. I’m glad I wasn’t along to see the one at the
top of this trail, but you’ll see it in the pictures.
Let it be known that the Laskins have crossed the
Continental Divide five times so far in this trip, and it will be six when we
head to the airport on Saturday. If
that’s not adventuring I don’t know what is.
9/1
RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT
The notes about the Ranch Creek Valley (where the DTR is) claim
that this ranch location is a haven of historical and anthropological mythology
and beauty. We find that a bit much, but
it is true that the landscape around here is really classic ranch country: a big wide green valley among the mountains,
dotted with camera-ready horses and the Black Angus cattle that everyone around
here seems to raise. All the houses
appear to be log cabins, varying from comfortable to gi-normous. When we wake in the morning, the valley floor
below our cabin is filled with mist, and it is cold! Then the sun burns that away, and it is blue
sky and green valleys and mountains surrounding. But like most days on our trip, clouds gather
in the afternoon, and more often than not a storm blows up, or perhaps we just
see the lightning sparking in the distance.
It is all very moody and dramatic when that happens and you are happy
that you are inside at the solid and comfortably cozy DTR until the storm blows
over.
Here’s how the Ranch got its name. There is a rocky outcropping way up high
here, visible from the Ranch, known as the Devil’s Thumb. Apparently, after the warring Ute and
Arapahoe settled their differences here, they buried the Devil himself in the
mountains. But they left his thumb
sticking up to remind them always of the evils of war. The town of Tabernash is named for a Ute
chief who was killed near there in the 1870s.
Today we went from high ranch valley country down down down
into more desert-like terrain, for Isabel’s most-anticipated event of this
vacation: rafting on the Colorado
River. Our guide for this endeavor is
straight out of Central Casting (one of several on this trip), a lean and
leathery river rat known as Mouse, sporting a gray ponytail and a gray and scraggly
beard. This is his 20th year
guiding rafting trips, and specifically, it is his 1,766th trip on
this stretch of the Upper Colorado, so we are in good hands. Haven’t had a swimmer in a decade, he warns
Isabel, so don’t make me have to come in after you. We are even more impressed when Mouse tells
us about guiding rafts down the Class V rapids of the Upper Gore Canyon during
the North American Whitewater Rafting Championships in the late 90s. He’s done it five times, but the best was
when something like 26 boats started down this race, and 10 finished. Mouse’s team took 8th place, and
he retired from competition on that fine finish. There are six classes of rapids, and if Class
I is take your granny, Class VI is death, a.k.a Niagara Falls. So V is pretty intense.
Mouse also talks a lot about CFS, Cubic Feet per Second,
which is basically how fast the river is running. More than 10,000 is say-your-prayers
level. At 1400 or so, the Colorado is still
running about triple what it normally does in early September this year, given
all the snow of last winter. So that
means our trip is a little faster than expected, but also that the rapids are a
little bigger. Apparently things were
pretty hairy in early June, during the big snowmelts, which is when they train
the new guides.
But now it is just a pleasant float down the river, with a
little splashing here and there. Mouse
sits on a rear rigger with two oars, and steers our vessel. We each have a paddle, and when asked we give
a pull but that is only occasionally in faster water. That thrill-seeker Isabel was disappointed
not to have higher water, as she apparently feels she is ready for more
adventurous water than we ran today. Rapids,
like ski runs, are named so that the guides remember them, and of course it also
gives the guide something to talk about with the landlubbers. We went through Wake Up (Class II) and
Needles Eye (Class III), and heard about Upper Gore rapids such as Widowmaker,
Applesauce, Toilet Bowl, and so on. The
nastier the rapid, the more gruesome the name, natch.
A highlight of our float is the sighting of a golden eagle,
perched right above the river. It
swooped down for a fish, missed it, and then flew back up to its perch. Even Mouse was impressed, but the many fishermen
on the river with us are firmly focused on the watery depths and have no
interest in things with feathers. They
are in hard-bottomed dories (how do they negotiate those rapids?), waders, and
a nifty-contraption called a Fish Cat, which is basically a chair on a couple
of inflatable pontoons, with some oars and a rigger for your fishing pole. We actually overheard one angler say “here,
fishy fishy.” We also saw some Western
Red-Headed Mergansers (a species of duck), and a big trout leap, and at our
put-out, some friendly dogs who really really wanted us to toss their sticks
into the river, which of course we were
happy to oblige.
To keep spirits up, Mouse tells jokes such as “what do you
call a river guide with half a brain?
Gifted!” He spins the boat around
and shouts “rotisserie tan!” When I need
a bit more sunscreen, I am handed a vintage bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, probably
ca. 1974. Mouse’s jokes are famous among
the other river guides. Apparently we
got the rated-G version, given the age of some of our party. Unfortunately they were too young to get the
one about how many D’s in Bonanza. I’ll
give you the punch line, and let you figure it out: 72.
All of this is framed by a stunningly beautiful morning, and
a float down a dramatic canyon. Mouse tells
us that “this is my office,” and we have to agree that one could do a lot worse
than to be a guide on the Upper Colorado River.
A few more interesting things we learned from Mouse: first was about the dead pine trees that we
see everywhere around here. You see them in the forests, even way up into
the National Park, and you also see great naked swaths of cleared land where
the dead ones have all been cut down.
Even though we know you have to remove the dead ones because they are
like a matchbox should there be a lightning strike, it still looks a bit
shocking. We had learned earlier that
this was the result of the mountain pine beetle getting in and killing the
lodgepole pines. But it turns out that
the beetle has always lived in the trees, it is just that when the trees are
healthy, they are able to eject the beetles themselves with sap. Come a stressful drought, however, as
happened in the early 2000s, and they don’t have the sap-ability to do that anymore,
so the beetles hang around and eventually kill the tree.
Another thing we learn is that Mr. Jones of the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, has an enormous mansion ranch in Kremmling, home of all the
rafting outfitters. They say he gave the
town $5 million to lengthen the runway so his Lear Jet could land there. Sure enough, as we leave Kremmling, we see a
large private jet in the teeny airport.
And finally, they say that the harshness of the coming
winter can be judged by the height of the skunk cabbage that grows near the
roads and the train tracks. According to
Mouse, looks like we’re in for another big one.
We drive miles out of Kremmling to try and find the world’s
largest deposit of ammonite fossils that Bill read about, known as Fossil
Ridge. But rather than risk the rented
Impala’s undercarriage on the two-track road that we must ascend to find it, we
turn back, unfulfilled. It is the only
unsuccessful expedition of our entire trip.
9/2
The dews are heavy here in Tabernash, and unlike the rest of
our trip, it is damp enough, or airtight enough in our little cabin that our
bathing suits and towels do not quite dry overnight. At the end of the afternoon today, after a
brief but wild storm blew through, a perfect rainbow arched right over the
valley, starting about in a meadow that I got to on my trail ride this morning,
and ending roughly in the fish pond. It
is really impossibly beautiful. Cue the
rainbow.
Fortunately I did not overestimate the strength of my butt
and choose the three-and-half-hour trail ride, else I’d not yet be sitting
down. An hour and a half on Rusty, a 16
y.o. “guest horse” (which means a very docile horse not prone to bolting or
otherwise making a ruckus) did me just fine.
The nice thing about the ride is that you get up into some of the higher
meadows overlooking the valley, and get a different view of the surrounding
mountains. And you have a handsome young
wrangler named Josh. I quite enjoyed it,
but am still a little sore.
Isabel’s pony ride, on Boss Hog, or Bossy, did not take her
so high up but I think was enjoyed as much if not more by the rider. Also at the stables are a picturesque calf,
some chickens, goats, a bunny, and a psychotic kitten named Stormy that somehow
manages to evade horse hooves while dashing maniacally about the
stableyard.
The ranch doesn’t own its own cattle. The picturesque Black Angus cattle wandering
around apparently belong to some Front Range cattlemen who bring them up to
this valley for the summer. But the
wranglers at the stable – absolutely as nice as can be – are real live cowboys
and girls. Isabel’s wrangler, Nikki, was
telling us about the morning challenge of cutting out three cows and bringing
them in from a far meadow and just as they were within a field or so, those
cows bolted back, so they had to start all over again. As with all of our tours on this trip, one
feels to be in extremely good hands with any wrangler at the DTR.
Peter may claim to hate long car rides, but he’ll ride an
hour for a rock shop, in this case all the way back over the Berthoud Pass to
Idaho Springs to the Gypsum Rose Rocks Minerals Jewelry shop. There the kids did some fossil rubbings and
actually purchased rocks to bring home (as opposed to just picking them up from
the ground, which is what they usually do, and we have a lot of those
too).
I think this means that they need to add two more trips
across the Continental Divide to the tally.
I cannot, as while they were gone I did indeed investigate the spa.
Next morning was a chilly one, with frost on the ground and
more of that impossibly picturesque mist burning off to another beautiful
day. We see a perfect hot air balloon rising
over the train tracks as we leave the Devil’s Thumb Ranch to start our return
journey to Massachusetts, so I guess that means that it is time to . . .
G’on now, git, as they say in ranch.
Here’s the stats round-up:
Pictures taken: about
5000. No seriously, about 400.
Miles driven: 1940
Vertical feet climbed:
gosh, that’s a hard one, could have been 40,000 or 50,000 feet, given
that we went over at least nine passes that were over 10,000 feet, but were
probably never below 5,000.
Critters spotted:
prairie dogs, yellow-bellied marmots, magpies, camp robbers, Western
jays, pelicans (really!), Western Red-Headed Mergansers, hummingbirds, a
Bluebird, moose, elk, some little chipmunk-like creature that we could not
identify but was everywhere, chickens, donkeys, horses, cows, goats, sheep,
cats and dogs, hawks, vultures, lots of lizards, and one golden eagle.
Names of animals that we met : Maisie the calf, Stormy the kitten, Lucy the
Donkey, Mae and Millet the goats, and our trusty steeds, Rusty and Boss Hogg,
all at the DTR. No one can remember the
name of the bunny. And there was that
friendly dog named Juno at the river who wanted us to throw his stick forever
and ever.
Varmints spotted:
snakes, 0; spiders, 1 (vanquished), praying mantis, 1. Some would argue that the prairie dog belongs
here.
Pools swum in: four,
not counting the Colorado River, which we wouldn’t let Isabel jump in and boy
was she mad at us.
Grilled cheese sandwiches eaten by Isabel: too many to keep track of.
Times we had to toss a child out of the car: zero.
And of course, some culinary adventures . . .
-
The world’s largest serving of biscuits and
gravy in Telluride.
-
Leftover cookies from Mouse’s Chocolates in
Ouray. (Bill is pretty sure it is not
the same Mouse.) They take all the
broken bits of truffles and fillings and leftovers, and bake them into
never-again-to-be-repeated cookies.
-
A mexican funnel cake in Silverton which is
basically funnel cake with taco toppings.
Kind of like a Navajo taco except the funnel cake is a little sweet.
-
Posole on the breakfast buffet at the Hotel
Strater in Durango
-
An actual Navajo taco at Mesa Verde, which is
just fry bread with taco toppings.
-
Bill’s pork and posole at The View.
-
Pepperhead in Cortez shows us a real slice of
local life because everyone is there:
cops, doctors still in their scrubs, native Americans, anglos,
rancher-looking types, bikers, just plain vanilla locals, and the Laskins from
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Excellent
margaritas with homemade liquors. And
the flan was pretty memorable, too.
-
Peter’s Navajo burger at The View – a giant
frybread with two hamburgers in it, brilliant.
-
Dinner in the Dark at the Red Cliffs Lodge was
not quite a highlight, but it was an experience. No bugs!
-
Lunch at the Ekleticafe in Moab, classic Moab –
beads and crystals and lots of whole grains.
Still, a BLT wrap with avocado and chipotle mayo goes down fine after a
morning at Arches NP.
-
A cheddar-ham-jalapeno scone from Ian’s Bakery
and Pizzeria (“try our pulled pork!”) in Granby, but eaten at Lake Irene in
RMNP.
-
The more casual restaurant at the DTR has a fine
bourbon selection, which I sample regularly.
Breakfast highlights there included a smoked trout scramble, which was
mighty tasty, and a pair of duck hash cakes with spinach and poached eggs and
hollandaise. Peter met his ultimate
breakfast delight: bacon pancakes.
-
More beef than anyone should eat in two
weeks.
-
A perfectly good peach-rhubarb potpie in
Tabernash, which was ruined by the presence of a coconut macaroon on top.
-
Peaches, peaches, peaches. We got our last batch in Cortez, and made
them last all the way to our last day at the DTR. Bill feels that we should just not bother
buying peaches around here anymore.
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