2500 miles and 20+ days and about halfway through our road trip.
We arrived in Denver at the end of June, picked up the hired car, spent a night in an airport hotel and then set off for our first stop which was Estes Park high in the Rockies. The car by the way was a Chevy Jeep SUV that was so big that it was a bit like driving a small bungalow. I tried to wipe the windscreen by hand but I couldn’t reach the middle, the hood comes up to my upper chest level.
As soon as we arrived we felt like shit. The motel we had booked turned out to be not very nice and the combined jet lag and mild altitude sickness really hit us. Headaches, disrupted sleep, mood swings, moments of dizziness and general fatigue. Made us both feel ancient and little depressed. But it slowly passed.
Estes Park was a nice enough little town, fairly touristy but the Rocky Mountain National Park was just a few miles up the road and it had a great little bookshop. Isabel and I both really love American independent bookshops and American books in general. The physical quality of the books here just delights us and we happily while away time in bookshops discussing and comparing the leading in the US books (leading is the space between lines of text and it is much more generous and therefore better than in Europe, even smaller fonts look delightful with more leading), the slightly larger formats used for paperbacks and the lovely matt coating they use for their covers (I often get odd stares from other customers who spot me running my hands over the book covers and purring a little as I feel its subtle stippled texture).
We managed a couple of hikes in in the Rockies, including one up to Emerald Lake, before moving on but the altitude meant the walking and especially the climbing was hard work. Above 10,000 feet we both ran out of puff alarmingly quickly on the uphill sections (i.e. 90% of the walk) and had to stop often to recover.
Emerald Lake at the end of our hike
One of the many waterfalls in the Rocky Mountain National Park
Isabel crosses a snow field on the way to Emerald Lake
From Estes Park we headed up and over the Rockies through the National Park and across the continental divide on one of the highest paved roads in America topping out around 12,500 feet. There was still a lot of snow around and we went part of the way up via the old dirt highway past lots of lovely vistas and a great waterfall all done at a sedate 15 miles an hour through the switchbacks.
The top of the pass over the Rocky Mountains on the way to Leadville
Once over the mountains we dipped down and then up again to reach our next stop which was Leadville, the highest town in Colorado. On the way we passed through the delightfully named town of Climax. We had stopped in Leadville once for lunch on a previous road trip during a snow storm and really liked the look of the place and so decided to come back and take a closer look. It’s an old mining town with many wonderful original buildings from the late 19th century and an odd population of tanned mountain folk with a lot of fairly weird and wonderful refugees from the rest of America who have washed up here. One can’t help but feel that some people who made their money from the drugs trade back in the sixties and seventies chose to retire to Leadville. It claims to have the highest (by altitude) head shop in America which we visited. We were there for the 4th July parade and we both got absurdly excited. Its was a great small town community event, a parade which included pretty much anyone who wanted to join in, the cops and local firemen (hitting their sirens), anybody with a horse or slightly odd vehicle (and there were a lot of them), the Scouts, a float promoting the campaign against domestic violence, etc etc. Many of the participants carried banners promoting candidates for local office. Everybody on the parade was chucking sweets and small plastic toys out of their cars by the handful and the local kids were running about in state of great excitement picking them, eventually even Isabel got carried away and grabbed some. Later that evening there was a truly stupendous fireworks display which we later discovered had cost an astonishing $10,000, all raised locally.
The 4th of July in Leadville
We stayed in Leadville for a happy four days pottering about.This was long enough to really encounter the odd and slightly overwhelming experience of American western conversation. Everywhere you go people say “hi,” “how are you?”, “how’s it going?” and as soon as we reply back comes the inevitable “you folks are not from around here?” opening gambit and then you know you are lost and soon you will be deep in often intimate conversation with complete strangers. One night in Leadville we sat down in a diner and bar and ordered our meals and noticed the elderly couple with a very hyperactive young boy on the adjacent table. The inevitable exchange of pleasantries and then Isabel was deep in conversation with the older lady.
Above the background of the diner noise I could only get snippets and within seconds of the conversation starting I knew this one was juicy. I heard the old lady’s indistinct voice “murmur, murmur – we are his legal guardians – murmur, murmur – his mom went of the rails – murmur, murmur – his father is serving two years with good behavour – murmur, murmur – technically he is a pedophile as she was only fourteen murmur, murmur – then he got involved with the Hells Angels and disappeared into the desert two years ago and nobody has seen him since – murmur, murmur”. On and on it went right through our dinner arriving and us eating it. Later Isabel said the reference to the Hells Angles seemed to refer to the women’s dentist.
Once when we were in Crested Butte (see below) we were walking down from the mountain and a mountain biker came down behind us, we stepped aside to let him pass and he said “thanks” and we said “no problem” and he said “have a great day” and we said “you too”. Then he stopped a little way down the track and we knew we were in for a conversation. As we approached he looked at me and said ” Australian?” – “no I’m from London” I said (lots of people have mistaken my accent for Australian in the US and in Europe). The mountain biker was suited up in the latest high tech and colourful biking kit with wrap around mirror shades, he was our age, maybe a little older, with a white goatee and large moustache. Within three minutes of the conversation starting we knew that he carried the flag in the 4th of July parade, that his only son had been killed in a car crash in Vegas a few years before, that he had lost his mother to cancer shortly after, that he was over that and enjoying life again, that he worked for a guy in town who owned lots of property in the area and that he spent time in Costa Rica also working on this guys property. I am not kidding – we got all this and more that I cannot remember in less than five minutes.
At one point I wanted to shoot some photos of the old buildings in Leadville and I left Isabel with the laptop in the coffee shop where she planned to write some emails. When I returned I discovered that she had abandoned the emails in the face of the relentless conversation with her two new best friends sitting at the table who were called Ernest and Joseph. It turned out that Ernest, who was sixty and who looked like a left over from Grateful Dead concert and Joseph, who was extraordinarily intense and never stopped talking unless you actually interrupted him and who was a very youthful looking 70, had themselves just met each other in the coffee shop and discovered they had something in common – they both ran in 100 mile road races. There are several such 100 mile events in that part of Colorado. As they chatted away sharing their intimate secrets with Isabel I strolled in and soon the conversation had shifted to photography which took some of the pressure off of Isabel. An hour and half later we tore ourselves away after the inevitable exchange of email addresses.
Isabel deep in conversation with Ernest and Joseph in a Leadville coffee shop
There is of course an entirely different form of western conversation practised by some we have met which consists mostly of silence. When we shredded our tire deep in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (see below) we managed to flag down a park ranger who did indeed help me change the tire, in fact he did most of the work, and during the whole exercise (during which we had to jointly solve several tricky technical problems like the jack being too small) he only actually uttered about five words. I thought at one point I would be forced to use sign language. Later we met Chip of “Chip’s Tires” in Moab where we spent several days popping in to see if the replacement wheel he had ordered for our jeep had arrived. Chip was a man of few words. “Hi” I would say “how are you” (the necessary preface to all transactions out here) “is the tire here?”. Chip wouldn’t even acknowledge by word or expression that he had heard what I had said. After a while he would wander off, seemingly to deal with several other unrelated issues in his team of workers at the tire shop, then wander back. “Nope”
After we left Leadville we headed over Independence Pass (12,500 plus and the second highest paved road in the US – fantastic views across the alpine tundra and large snow pockets at the summit) to the small mountain town of Crested Butte. On the way we stopped for lunch in Aspen, ghastly place, don’t go there. Crested Butte on the other hand turned out to be a very pleasant place, surrounded by mountains, the wild flower capital of Colorado and full of award winning restaurants. So we ate and we walked and we had a very nice time indeed. It even had a passably good book shop.
At the top of Independence Pass
Isabel walking above Crested Butte
At the summit of Mount Crested Butte, 12,500, puffed but happy
One night we went to the monthly civic forum meeting. Crested Butte attracts a lot of well connected and intellectual retirees, and the topic on the night we went was the USA’s response to Iran. The speaker was an ex-diplomat who had spent a lot of time in the communist block, spoke fluent Russian, had all sorts of academic and government connections and I thought had ex-spook written all over him. What he had been working on for several years was building informal links to the leadership in Teheran and trying to convince the US government to have a more nuanced and subtle approach to Iran. His talk was excellent, full of useful information and insight and the Q&A after also produced lots of interesting debate. A great evening.
After Crested Butte we headed off for Moab and Utah’s red rock country. We had been to Moab before but I wanted to go back to photograph the fantastic and wild canyon landscape although we knew that with daily temperatures mostly over 100 degrees the hiking would be limited. On the way we planned to spend a couple of hours having a look at the huge and deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The canyon itself is 2000 feet deep and after taking in the rim views and suffering a bit in the heat we decided to take the switchback road to the bottom of the canyon before resuming our journey to Moab. Unfortunately almost at the bottom the Jeep’s front wheel came of the road and into a deep gully full of sharp rocks and dead tree timber. We managed to pull the jeep out before hitting the canyon wall but by then we had a large piece of timber embedded in the shredded tire and the aluminium wheel rim was also chewed up. As we stopped the tire just deflated. We were a bit stuck. We had no phone signal and when I checked for a spare tire I couldn’t even locate it. Luckily with the help of a passing driver we managed to locate the spare which in Jeeps is slung under the car but neither of us could work out how to release it. Eventually the verbally challenged ranger stopped and we were were soon on our way again.
The 2000 foot deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison, We managed to shred our tire at the bottom,
We wasted a couple or hours in nearby Montrose trying unsuccessfully to sort out the tire and then set off for Moab again several hours behind schedule. We drove for three hours through a lot of very pretty nothingness (a bit nervous given we now had no spare tire) and passed the tiny town of Paradox before getting to Moab just before dusk where we were met by a glorious sunset sky, a very nice large motel room and a couple of cold beers.
Outside of Paradox in Utah on the way to Moab
To be continued……………………..
