Celebrating Themeless Discontinuity: Life in the Rockies, Day 2

Day 2 of our weekend getaway (plus hour-long drive to our weekend getaway locale), started with rain. It looked so gloomy all day that it took us until the afternoon to actually convince ourselves to leave our hotel room. But, as is always the case in the Rockies, the weather can change faster than my mood, and as soon as we hit the road, we were greeted with sunshine and fresh mountain air. It was a little chillier than yesterday, but I’m about ready for fall, so I was stoked. The Trail Ridge Road was open, so we decided to head to the other side of the park, utilizing the massively high road (over 12,000 feet, the highest road in any national park in the US) to get there. Going up and over, I can completely understand why they would take even a little bit of snow so seriously and close it so readily: there’s a good 4000-foot drop off in many places along the windy and very narrow road. We saw a couple of trailers up along there, and we marveled at how ballsy (stupid?) they must be.

It was nice to see snow, and in some of the best snow-covered areas you could make out the tracks of sleds, snowboards, and even odd skis from adventure lovers and thrill seekers. People mulled around the visitor’s center up top, some shivering in t-shirts, and others bundles in their fanciest winter digs. We cruised through, a ghost town on our minds for a destination.

We reached the Colorado River Trailhead in the early afternoon. The trail itself leads to several branches up and over the mountains in the northern end of the park. It winds its way along the headwaters of the Colorado River. It’s amazing that such a river, despite its recent shortcomings, has such humble beginnings. Several creeks come together to form a river crossable by a fallen tree, as Jonmikel did in the shot below. The Mighty Colorado.

Part of this trail led up to Lulu City and the Shepler Mines, a silver mining community once home to some 500 people back in the 1880s. It’s just under 4 miles in, and had homesteads, hotels, saloons, stores and a justice of the peace. Pretty hard core. We climbed up to the mine to explore what we could; most of it was closed off due to generally deadly conditions: toxic gas, rotting infrastructure, steep drops with deep, drown-inducing pools at the bottom. You know, the usual. The rest of the town was completely washed out during flooding when the Grand Ditch, an ugly yet historical scar running the length of several mountains in the northern part of the park that brings water from one side of the Continental Divide to the other (effectively cutting the flow of the Colorado River in half since the 1930s) to irrigate farms, etc. neat Ft. Collins, burst, causing millions of dollars in damage to park resources. It has only recently been decided that the company who owns the ditch owes that money back to the Park.

I could go on forever about the injustices done to the park and how corporations try to get around it all, but I won’t.

Despite the emptiness now surrounding the area, the setting for the former town is quite beautiful; I was thinking of building a homestead there myself. Sitting at the base of several mountains and right on the shores of the Colorado, it would make the perfect setting for a town, though from what I understand no one ever became rich from the mines. It was a great little hike, and mostly flat, which was great because we were both a little tired from yesterday. After a year at sea level, 9000 feet was proving quite challenging. I did get a chance to fiddle with the aperture, shutter speed, and film speed settings in my camera, and also started shooting in raw, to take better advantage of its capabilities.

On our way back to Ft. Collins, we drove up the Trail Ridge Road again, watching the sun set over the mountains and stopping to try and get a shot of the full moon as it rose. It was frigid up top, and the wind chill almost froze my little fingers off. Surprisingly, the snowmelt that covered the road in ringlets of watery streams had not yet frozen, but I did spend a lot of time imagining the Vibe flying through the sky and wondering if they would ever find it 5000 feet below…

We also stopped at Taco Bell (I know, right?) in Estes Park. It was staffed entirely by Jamaicans (or, because I am ignorant of specific Caribbean accents, Caribbeaners). I found myself wondering what their stories were, why several 20-somethings from warmer waters have found themselves in the Middle of Nowhere Mountainous Colorado.