Rocky Mountain High
Yesterday we were approaching Denver from the East and could see a wall of stormy-looking cloud cover over the distant mountains to the West. I have always been a big fan of big sky western panoramas with cloud formations covering the skies. There is something about that sort of view that seems to scream America the Beautiful to me. The power of the weather as shown by the clouds combined with the western big sky scenery brings peace to me for some odd reason. I am sure that neither the visage of the mountains nor the storm clouds would have been comforting to the settlers who covered the distance not in an air conditioned Mercedes, but a Calistoga wagon, bumping along a rutted trail trying to seek something better to the West.
There is something about Denver that makes people smile. It’s the “Mile-high City”, it’s where people who love to ski go to live if they want a meaningful urban center (even though I think Salt Lake City plays that role much better due to the proximity to the slopes), it’s for outdoorsy people who like to hike a d camp, and now, it’s for people who want legal access to recreational marijuana. I was a bit surprised that the mountains were as far away from the city as they were. Maybe it was just where our hotel was situated or maybe I got spoiled by my years of going to SLC. But we started our day heading straight for those mountains on Rt. 70 and were in the thick of it soon enough. We got to 11,000 feet of altitude (that’s pretty high) when we got to the Continental Divide, where the 2.7 mile Eisenhower Tunnel, finished westbound in 1973, kept us from needing to go even higher.
The Continental Divide is actually only one of the six major hydrological divides in North America. But it is actually called the Great Continental Divide since it runs from the Arctic Circle, through Alaska, Canada, the continental U.S. (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New México), México, Central America and down the spine of South America through the heart of the Andes, all the way to Tierra del Fuego on the Straights of Magellan. Thought of in its most simple form, water flows either East or West depending on which side of the Divide it finds itself. The great rivers of America have been a meaningful part of this road trip, so demarcating the crossing of the Great Continental Divide through our drive across and underneath the Rocky Mountains is worth noting.
We began tracing the Ohio River towards the Mississippi. We then flirted back and forth across the Missouri River and touched the Arkansas River in Kansas and Colorado. That’s where we picked up the Colorado through the Rockies and into Utah. We are in Moab at the moment and within. Five-iron of the Colorado River before it cuts its way through the vast wilderness of Canyonlands. It is in the middle of that wilderness, far from anywhere I have been on foot, that the Green River, that begins up in Wyoming, connects to strengthen the Colorado River. Tomorrow we will cross the Colorado once more at Glen Canyon, where it becomes Lake Powell. We will also cross the Dirty Devil River that meets the Colorado at Lake Powell. In the thirty years l’ve been coming to enjoy Southern Utah, I have watched Lake Powell and the Colorado greatly diminish in volume and thus grandeur, when we stand at the Hite Overlook, I will show our friends just how visible those changes are. The process of overuse by humans and agriculture combined with mega-droughts that seem to never end as Climate Change grips the world, has forever changed the shape of this part of the country.
The first time I came here with my friend Arthur Einstein, everywhere we stopped to enjoy the intersection of rivers and stone canyons, he felt it necessary to remind us that “all this was once under water.” Well, after millennia of letting the waters recede and the rivers to flow Westward and South towards the Sea of Cortez, they have cut the great canyons of the Southwest. The Grand Canyon is known to all, but the Canyonlands we overlooked from Dead Horse Point here in Moab today and the Canyons we will circumnavigate tomorrow (the Park is 338,000 acres in size) and that run almost to Lake Powell are just the start. But then again, it might be more accurate to say it is more the end than the start, given the dwindling snowmelt and the rising temperatures (it hit 116 degrees here in Moab today). Perhaps the wind erosion will continue to sculpt the great spires of red rock we saw in Arches National Park today, but we can pretty much assume that we have seen the end of the great water erosion impact that cut the bulk of these great canyons.
While we were enjoying our Rocky Mountain High today, we passed by several of the great ski areas of Colorado. There was Vail, Copper, Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, Snowmass and Aspen yo name a few. According to the EPA, the snowpack of the Colorado Rockies has declined by over 40% in the past few hundred years since man has been screwing with the environment. Less snowpack means less skiing, but luckily winter snow sports like skiing are on the severe decline as well as Baby Boomers like me age out of the sport (I stopped a lifetime of skiing in 2007). But less snowpack also means less snowmelt and thus less water for this part of the world. Sad but true. I’m just glad I got to see it and enjoy it before it’s too late. I’m afraid my grandchildren will have to hurry down here if they are to be able to say the same.
We have another day and a half of Utah to enjoy and to me, it’s the best part of the state that lies before us. I’ve spent far less time in the Rocky Mountains than the Wasatch, the Uintas and the canyons from Arches to Zion. In fact, driving through Vail Pass twice in the past five weeks has greatly increased my hang-time in the Rockies where these two full days in Utah only represent 25% of the time I have spent here in 2021. I consider myself a rank amateur on the Rockies, but a true expert witness on the subject of Utah, a state where I had a home for fifteen years and I have led perhaps 30 expeditions (mostly by motorcycle, but not only).
As I age I find myself occasionally indulging in thoughts about whether I will pass this way again. We are going to Spain and Portugal in September (a motorcycle ride from Barcelona to Porto). We will ride the Pyrenees and the Camino de Santiago. We have already said to one another that we may never pass that way again after that trip. My guess is that Kim and I will enjoy many trips through the Rockies and even more through the canyons of Utah. I think we have many more Rocky Mountain Highs ahead of us. Maybe the mountains will look smaller and smaller to us like the rivers and lakes have shrunk, but they will always be worthy of both our wonder and our wandering.