Rocky Mountain High. August 8, 2019

Copyright © 2019                               John F. Oyler 

August 8, 2019

Rocky Mountain High

I have just returned from another exciting trip to Colorado, to visit my daughter Sara and her family. There is so much to see there that it would take a lifetime to take in all the sights.

This time we decided to begin with a ride on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway. Sara and my granddaughter Claire met me at the Denver airport early one evening and drove west on I-70 past the Continental Divide to Frisco, where we checked into a Ramada Inn.

My flight had been quite pleasant, but the positive experience of the “Friendly Skies” was damaged by the fact that the one piece of luggage I had checked didn’t show up at baggage claim in Denver. Sara quickly learned that it was coming on a later flight and that it would be delivered to our motel in Frisco before morning. It was a minor inconvenience, as past experience had taught me I should carry all my essentials in my carry-on bag.

The next morning we learned that the lost bag had been picked up by a delivery service and would arrive at Frisco late that afternoon. Sara then arranged for it to be diverted to the Holiday Inn Express in Alamosa where we would be staying the next two nights.

After breakfast we got back on I-70 and followed it through spectacular scenery to its junction with Colorado Route 91, “the Top of the Rockies Byway”, which eventually brought us to Leadville. This route took us through the Arapaho National Forest up the western face of the Continental Divide to Fremont Pass (11,318 feet above sea level), with “fourteeners” Quandry Peak, Mt. Lincoln, Mt. Cameron, Mt. Democrat, and Mt. Bross in rapid succession east of us.

Colorado is blessed with fifty-three peaks at elevations more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Alaska has twenty-nine “fourteeners”; the rest of the United States, fourteen more. Each one is worthy of a sight-seeing expedition; the plethora of them in Colorado is an embarrassment of riches. This brought our total to nine, having seen Mt. Evans, Mt. Bierstadt, Torreys Peak, and Grays Peak the previous evening.

Just north of Fremont Pass we had driven through the area where Climax Molybdenum operates a massive open pit mining operation, capable of producing 15,000 tons of molybdenum a year. The huge pit on the side of the mountain and the large tailings reservoirs nearby are stark reminders of the classic challenge of extracting minerals from the earth with a minimum of disruption to the environment.

Leadville itself is an excellent tourist attraction. At an elevation of 10,152 feet, it is the largest incorporated municipality in the United States. In its heyday in the late nineteenth century it had the largest population of any city in Colorado except for Denver. Celebrities associated with Leadville include Doc Holiday, the James brothers, the “Unsinkable Molly Brown”, and Meyer Guggenheim.

We took advantage of the opportunity to explore Leadville’s silver mining past by visiting the remnants of the Matchless Mine, in the foothills east of the city. We then elected to take a drive on the “Trail of the Silver Kings”, a network of roads that allegedly connected the sites of numerous productive mines of the past.

The brochure for this trail should have reported that it was suitable only for four-wheel high clearance vehicles; the Chevrolet Cruze that Sara had rented was not of that category. As soon as the road left Matchless Mine it turned from asphalt to dirt and then quickly to a completely unimproved mountain road Sara was a good sport as I skillfully navigated our return to civilization. I reminded her of a time years ago when we had a similar experience in a station wagon in West Virginia, ending up driving on a railroad right-of-way berm till we found a paved highway.

After a pleasant lunch in the Tennessee Pass Café we walked around “downtown” Leadville till Claire found an ice cream parlor to provide us with dessert. We then headed south, on Colorado Route 24, which we had joined just north of Leadville. We were now in the valley of the Arkansas River with the Sawatch Mountains to the west and the Mosquito Range to the east. 

Mount Massive dominated the western skyline at Leadville; Sherman in the Mosquito Range, and Elbert a few miles farther south boosted our count to twelve. All the fourteeners had some snow cover remaining, a glorious sight late in July. 

An indispensable companion throughout the trip was Sara’s copy of “Roadside Geology of Colorado”. I think we bought it when Sara and Jim first moved to Colorado. Its identification of exposed rocks at highway cuts and discussion of the geological events that produced them adds a lot to my sightseeing enjoyment. Sure enough, at the village of Granite we were able to stop and investigate a massive granite hillside.

South of Buena Vista we stopped at a “Point of Interest” and were learning the history of water rights in that area when Sara received a text message from “Nick”, the delivery service agent who was driving to Alamosa with my bag. Turned out he was only fifteen minutes behind us on the same route. We were happy to wait there till he arrived; he was happy to have avoided the long remaining drive to Alamosa. 

At about this point Route 24 takes off to the east, a route we will follow on our return north. We continued on south on Route 285, “the Collegiate Peaks Byway”. The Sawatch fourteeners continued with Princeton, Antero, Tabeguache Peak, and Shavano, each equally majestic. At Poncha Springs we crossed the south branch of the Arkansas River, which joins the main river as it begins it long journey east to the Mississippi.

Our route then climbed out of the valley and up to Poncha Pass (9,010 feet) between the Sawatch range on the west and the Sangre de Cristo range to the east. From that point we descended rapidly into the narrow north end of San Luis Valley. We left route 285 and took route 17 on to Alamosa.

The San Luis Valley is a dramatically different environment. “Bigger than Connecticut”, it is a high (7,600 feet) desert with sufficient water to become the headwaters of the Rio Grande River. Seventy five miles wide and one hundred twenty five miles long, it was created when parallel north-south faults occurred during the Laramide Orogeny permitting the basin to remain level as mountains were uplifted on both sides.

The San Luis Valley is also a hotbed of UFO conspiracy advocates, with numerous reports of cattle mutilation. Locals call route 17 “the cosmic highway”. A well-known tourist attraction is the UFO watch tower, adjacent to which are some carefully placed rocks “that are the opening to a parallel universe”. We bypassed it, having our hands full with this universe.

A legitimate natural wonder in the valley are the Great Sand Dunes. Remnants of an ancient inland sea, the dunes cover thirty square miles and are seven hundred feet high in places. Colorado is indeed a geologic museum.

We checked into a Holiday Express Motel in Alamosa and enjoyed dinner nearby at a Chili’s Restaurant. The next day we rode on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway, a fine experience that will be documented in next week’s column.

Our trip north the next day retraced our previous route as far as the junction of route 285 and route 24 south of Buena Vista. At this point we took 24 to the northeast, through a high pass in the Mosquito Range and into another montane valley. Our destination was the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, south of the village of Florissant, on the Gold Belt Tour and Scenic Byway, route 1. To an outsider, Colorado’s obsession with identifying the mountain roads as scenic byways seems like overkill. To quote someone else’s comment, “there is a postcard in every direction in Colorado”. 

The Fossil Beds Monument was well worth visiting. It is the site of an ancient lake where millennia of deposition of diatoms accompanied by numerous nearby volcanic eruptions have produced a rich treasure of fossils, primarily Eocene Era (thirty-four million years ago) plants, insects, and small animals. In addition, there are numerous petrified stumps of large redwood trees of that time.

We toured the museum, watched the obligatory film, followed a trail to the petrified stumps and a typical fossil shale outcropping, then ate a picnic lunch in a shelter near the Visitor Center. The picnic was particularly nostalgic, reminiscent of many predecessors in similar locations where our children were young.

Sara and I had just had a discussion of the merits of the federal government taking over the health care system, with my commenting that I was concerned about the government’s ability to do anything well. This was obviously the wrong thing to say to a government employee, and certainly this specific site is a perfect example of something extremely well done. Perhaps we should assign the responsibility for health care to the National Park Service.

I also came away from this visit with a renewed respect for paleontologists. I suspect I see this as merely one more subdivision of historical studies; at any rate I am impressed with the work they do and with the insight into our environment they provide. 

From Florissant we drove east to Woodland Park, then followed route 67 north through gorgeous scenery in Pike National Forest, with Pike’s Peak (our seventeenth fourteener!) to the southeast. This is the region devastated by the Hayman forest fire in 2002. For quite a distance the ridges to the west of the highway were peppered with the trunks of dead trees. I was surprised at the absence of new growth despite the fire occurring seventeen years ago.

We eventually found our way to route 285 and then to I-470 and fought our way north to Fort Collins, through rush hour traffic. The Interstate highway system is outstanding, but it still is overtaxed everywhere it goes through urban metropolises.

Sara and Claire were excellent travelling companions. As is true of most third children, they are both easy going, “half-full glass” type persons, eager to try out new things and very slow to complain about things that go wrong.

The highlight of the rest of my visit with Sara’s family was attending two performances of the musical play “Matilda”, in which Ian played the role of Nigel. I was completely unfamiliar with this show, which is based on a novel by Roald Dahl about a precocious young girl with psycho-kinetic powers. Nigel is one of her classmates. 

Once I figured out what the play was all about, I was able to appreciate the accomplishments of everyone involved in it. It was produced by a theater arts academy that provides aspiring young actors and actresses with a three-week-long workshop culminating in the performance of a challenging musical drama.

This is the eighth major play or musical in which Ian has performed – four with this academy and four with the high school. The Academy will be repeating its workshop for younger students next week, again to perform “Matilda”. Ian is going to help this effort as an intern; Claire is trying out for a role in the show.

In the meantime Nora is eagerly awaiting the next school year; she will be a Freshman at Rocky Mountain High School. This week she is off to Estes Park for a three-day workshop with next year’s Student Council members at the school.

My trip home was uneventful; I even was able to find my luggage in baggage claim. All told, it was a wonderful trip. Nonetheless, “East, West, Home’s Best!”