Mountain Time
Yesterday we crossed out of Utah and after a quick stop at Four Corners, adding New Mexico to the trip’s list of states covered (bringing it now to six states), we passed into the Rocky Mountain State of Colorado. I’ve just spent my second night at altitude (6,600 feet here in Durango) and while I got a slightly better night’s sleep, I can still feel the affects of the lower oxygen levels just going from here to there. I will just about be acclimated to the altitude after another three or four nights of it that when I return to our little hilltop (1,600 feet), I should feel like a million bucks. But then again, like all the online ads about retirement savings say, a million bucks ain’t what it used to be. We have been in the Mountain Time zone for a day now and will be for the rest of the trip. While it is still quite hot here in the mountains, you can especially feel the mountain cool in the mornings.
Today we will cover an area in Colorado that I have never traveled through. Our main objective is to go to the Great Sand Dune National Park near the city of Pueblo. These are the largest sand dunes in America and come into being as a result of a combination of a typical geologic event in this area and another that is quite unique. The typical is that much of these areas that are so prolific in canyons used to be large inland seas, covered with fresh water that accumulated from all the rain and snow in the mountains, in this case the great Rocky Mountains of Colorado, especially that which came down on the western side of the Continental Divide. Unlike the watershed in the northern part of the state that feeds the mighty Colorado River, this area to the south tended to accumulate water at the southwest base of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains before it slowly flows out via several rivers including the Rio Grande. When it accumulated, it did so while depositing large amounts of eroded rock which became the course sand that eventually formed the Great Sand Dunes as the area eventually drained as rain and snow falls moderated over the millennia.
The other, more unique, geological event is actually more of a meteorological event which is a combination of winds that come from the southwesterly situated San Juan Mountains and simultaneously down off of the Sangre De Cristos. These dunes range in height from 700 to 740 feet and are a direct result of these opposing winds keeping the course, multicolored sand in its place. There are opportunities for sand boarding and sledding on the dunes, but I’m guessing we will spend most of our time looking a them and perhaps stumbling up one of them from the various visitor view points in the park.
Our plan was to visit something called Bishop’s Castle, which sits in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains south of Canon City. It seems to be one of these strange attractions, not unlike the famous sculptures in other parts of the country where some man has decided that he heeds to do something unique to memorialize himself and or his views of the world for posterity sake. In this case, a guy by the name of Bishop started such a project in 1969 with $450 worth of remote mountain land adjacent to federal lands. So, right there next to Rt.165, Bishop began by stacking up a pile of rocks that started to resemble a castle to some who passed. What started as a curiosity became an attraction to people passing through the mountains, so I imagine one thing fed on another and Bishop started gathering donations enough to build out his personal castle and ended up creating this random and somewhat unplanned and undersigned structure with multiple turrets and towers with metal scaffolding sticking out in every direction. John and the girls had fun climbing all over the rickety structure while Carolyn, Kim and I gasped in horror at the dangerousness of the whole affair.
We were to be overnighting in Canon City, north of the Great Sand Dunes. We were running late by the time we arrived so we stopped at Chi;i’s for dinner and made a spot call to upgrade from the local Quality Inn to the more familiar and reliable Hampton Inn. Here in the mountains, its not clear how they rate hotels, but I think we may have made a bad trade. C’est la vie. This left us fairly close to where we will meet up with Thomas on Thursday as we head up Pikes Peak and make sure to not miss the North Pole Colorado Santa’s Workshop at the base of the hill climb. My family has never met a piece of Americana kitsch that it hasn’t wanted to visit and contemplate the commercial merchandising opportunities thereof. From there we will head up into Denver where Carolyn and her family will stay with Tom and Jenna and Kim and I will stay at a nearby Hampton Inn, our preferred lodging when we travel (I am sitting in the Durango Hampton Inn as I write this).
The plan for Denver is to get a feel for the city that Tom and Jenna now call home and spend the day Friday in nearby Golden, which is supposed to be a pleasant suburb. But then again. I now see that the area north of Denver is getting hit hard with wildfires and that the smoke is filling the air in and around Golden. We’ll have to see what all of that does to our plans for a day in the mountains. Our objective is to let Tom and Jenna show us their new hometown.
It’s another clear mountain morning and it seems like just the right kind of day to climb Pike’s Peak to get a panoramic view of the surroundings. We are a car full of weary travelers at this point, having had our fill of cheap Hampton Inn breakfasts and driving from here to there. We met up with son Thomas in the early morning parking lot of North Pole Colorado’s Santa’s Workshop, located at the base of Pikes Peak. We spent about 90 minutes walking around the 1950’s style family attraction with its old carnival-like kid’s rides and various North Pole buildings set on this hillside in the woods. It is strange to me that Americans are so enthralled with Christmas that a Christmas attraction can draw crowds in the middle of summer, but it does.
Then, once we had had our fill of Santa and his elves, we started up the mountain switchbacks for 19 miles that took us from 7,000 feet of altitude to 14,000 feet. Once we got above the tree line and were surrounded by open fields of stone-studded emptiness, we all got focused on our every breath, wondering if we were feeling well or whether the lack of oxygen was affecting us. While John and the girls went with Thomas, I had Kim and Carolyn in my car. Everyone felt some amount of pulmonary pressure with Kim getting a headache and Carolyn getting a backache. I stayed focused on the road ahead, which was without much in the way of guardrails and had that wheel-gripping scariness to it. This road up Pikes Peak is not for the feint of heart, it takes some nerve and concentration. It is considered America’s Mountain, but I still am unclear of why we humans feel it is important to go up for the panoramic view. We all fly at higher heights and see more panorama from airplanes and yet these mountain climbs still draw us by the millions each year. I guess if it’s Mountain Time you gotta go up the highest mountain to feel right about the world.