“”And if God doesn’t live in Colorado, I’ll bet that’s where He spends most of His time…”---Merle Haggard
Things are getting tough for the global warming naysayers. A monstrous heat dome covers half the United States, bringing with it record temperatures from Phoenix to Pflugerville. Rampaging Canadian wildfires swoop down over the border, smogging the air and turning Philadelphia into Beijing. Megablasts slam into poor little Vermont, shocking residents, flooding the capitol and routing Ben & Jerry. Is there no relief, no shelter from the storm? Maybe it’s time to hustle off to unencumbered Colorado, where the deer and the pot sellers roam.
Now, your average traveler might be metropolis-minded, seduced by the wonders of Manhattan, Los Angeles or South Beach, but your Colorado dreamer is heading first for Estes Park, a chummy little slice of heaven which doubles as base camp for Rocky Mountain National Park. Estes has all the amenities, including delightful temperatures, quaint little shops, endless sidewalk eateries and the infamous Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s old page-turner, The Shining, where all rooms come with the ghost of your choice. Estes is also the elk capital of the world. The critters can be found hanging out at the Friday night concerts in Bond Park, bumming meals on Elkhorn Avenue and posing for pictures at the Visitors Center (don’t forget to tip your elk). If you don’t see an elk, you’ve been misdirected to Pueblo.
If that’s not enough, the lively Fall River cleverly weaves its way through town, slipping under streets, gurgling along trails, disappearing for a block or two, then reappearing on its 17-mile course from its source near the Alpine Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National Park. From there, it gushes down a canyon, rolls over Chasm Falls and into Estes Park and a confluence with the Big Thompson River thereat.
It’s cool enough in the mid-July mornings in EP, starting off near 50 degrees, topping out at 80, little chance of rain. If that’s not chilly enough for you, take a trip from the 7500-foot elevation of Estes up to the 11,500-foot Tundra region of RMNP, where the temperature and the gales are both in the forties and walking uphill is a laugh a minute. Any Floridian who has ever tried to push forward in a hurricane gets the idea, but at least those Southerners aren’t freezing to death in the process. We smiled at a young woman wearing spandex and a camera as she zipped nonstop from place to place, quickly taking photos. “I feel like I’ll freeze in place if I stop,” she said, correctly. A visitor’s slow adjustment from sea-level to eleven-thousand feet above doesn’t help much either. The transition period for most is two to three days, unless your name is Sharon Yeago; if it is, they haul you down off the mountain, stick an air hose up your nose and feed you Muscatel. Every cloud has a silver lining, right Sharon?
The Shuttle Nazi
Five years before Covid arrived, the national parks were begging for business. Every Ranger talk began and ended with a plea to tell all your friends about the glories inherent therein, beef up the admission totals and hopefully get the government off the dime spending a few bucks to brighten the places up. Since Covid, they’re so busy you need a personal invitation from the Secretary of the Interior to get in. Failing that, you can make reservations to the more prominent places months ahead or cast your lot with a pressure-packed five p.m. first-come, first-served lottery call for a seat on the hikers shuttle bus the day before you wish to enter, as Siobhan did. You’ve got fifteen minutes from reception of the call to input all your data, otherwise you start again from scratch. Seems easy until you get another call right in the middle of your process and wind up sneaking under the wire by the width of a taupe nose.
After a plentiful and expensive breakfast at The Egg And I (which has, alas, recently been renamed something bland and forgettable), Siobhan and I trudged over to the Estes Visitor Center to await the shuttle. While she made a phone call, I searched out the loading zone, which seemed to be patrolled by a squarish, lumpy fellow with a Ranger hat and a disposition just this side of Vlad The Impaler. “Hikers Shuttle?” he rasped anxiously. I nodded, pulled out my senior pass and ID. “My wife has our schedule hours,” I told him, “she’s finishing up a phone call in the parking lot.”
The man frowned. “I need to get this information as soon as possible,” he complained. Mind you, we were 55 minutes from pickup time and there was noone else in sight. I hailed Siobhan and she came over and finished the enrollment so the agitated dispatcher could resume pacing. “Bill, that’s not a guy, that’s a woman,” Siobhan said. Gee, most of the time I can tell the difference. After another look, I noticed a badge which read “Vicki.” “What was your first hint.” I asked my wife.
Five minutes later, a young couple appeared. The man approached Vicki while the wife ran off to the car for their paperwork. This didn’t sit well with the itchy dispatcher who jogged a few steps after the woman reminding her of the need for haste. The girl quickly returned and signed up, looked over to us and rolled her eyes as if to ask “You, too?” I smiled and nodded in alliance. Not long after, two twentyish Japanese girls appeared, their cheery smiles reduced to looks of terror within seconds of meeting Vicki. I kept waiting for someone to err colossally and be told, “No bus for YOU, Dumbo!”
The dispatcher hopped on the shuttle before departure and delineated the rules and regulations like a drill sergeant. She did not tell us to have a nice day. You could almost hear the Asian girls exhale when she jumped off and the doors closed. As we pulled out, I knocked on the window to get our nemesis’ attention, waving gaily as she put her palm up to ward off any good will which might be threatening. Then I mouthed the words, “We love you, Vicki.” She turned her head quickly, but hard as she tried she couldn’t suppress the beginning crack of a smile. It was probably the first one in years. “We win,” I told Siobhan.
Lord, Won’t You Buy Me A Carrier AC
You should know that the hotels in Colorado don’t believe in air-conditioning. Oh, they have all the trappings…the thermostats on the walls, the funky windowboxes, the temperature knob you can turn up and down and all around. Doesn’t matter, none of it works. If you chance to point this out they’ll tell you to open a window. But that way, along with the occasional breeze, you get the sounds of interstate carnage, mariachi music from the saloon next door and the sad goodbyes of Shirley and Brent breaking up in the parking lot. We’d rather not.
Sometimes, they try to fool you. At the otherwise charming Gateway Inn in Grand Lake, they have a booming loud fan on the AC, a reassuring placebo until you wake up at three a.m. and notice the temperature hasn’t changed one whit. At the Maxwell Inn in Estes Park, they have elfin-sized ACs on the windows which struggle to stay on for ten minutes, then collapse in agony. At the Super 8 in Colorado Springs, they power the air-conditioning with a large herd of amphetamine-aided armadillos propelling a giant wheel, but the dillos are old and wheezy and get off at ten.
A customer can, of course, counter this lack of hospitality by purchasing a portable fan or sticking his head in the mini-fridge for awhile, but both alternatives have their drawbacks. All of this could be rectified immediately if whoever is in charge of these things would just make Ambien an OTC drug or hire unemployed immigrants to give needy guests backrubs. We tried sleeping in the car one night but that caught the notice of scoldy Officer Friendly, who came tap-tap-tapping on the windshield at two a.m.
We got up sleep-deprived and toasty one morning in Amarosa and went outside for breakfast just as an agile young man we’ll call Eddie was climbing out of a nearby dumpster. One of his bedraggled friends was waiting on the dumpsterstep with an urgent question. “How’s the sleeping in there?” he wanted to know. Eddie smiled and jumped down. “Cool as a cucumber,” he smiled. “I’m fresh as any daisy.” I looked at Siobhan. Siobhan looked at me. “Not in ten million years,” she sneered.
Ah, for the life of a vagabond.
Looking For Larry
You knew we would. We first met the phantom fisherman eleven years ago on the trail to Ouzel Falls in the Southeast corner of Rocky Mountain National Park. He accompanied us along the trail discussing issues of the day, the dubious wonders of Kansas and a son of his in the military, now and then darting off “to fish” in one desirable spot or another. The deviations these mini-expeditions into angling took would leave any other person well behind us on the march to Ouzel Falls, but not Larry. Out of nowhere, he would pop back up beside us again as if time and space were not significant encumbrances. His pristine fishing rod, which he prized highly, never appeared wet or otherwise compromised.
At the end of our day on that trip, we said final goodbyes in the parking lot, took photos all around and spoke of meeting again some day. Then Larry was off to further adventures and we were off to get our photos developed, it being the ancient days before widespread cell phone use. Next day when we went to pick up the pictures, we were shocked to see that not one of the clear and brilliant shots contained Larry. This eerie incident might have stimulated the birth of my current slogan about answers and enigmas.
You have to really want to go to the Wild Basin Trailhead. The road in is indescribably horrid, constantly making Axlebreaker Magazine’s Top Ten Roadways. It is a winding path of pure dirt with potholes as large as Crater Lake and twice as deep. There are many spots where two cars won’t fit on the same piece of land and someone has to barge into the weeds to allow passage. Siobhan was convinced we would never arrive at the parking lot and that not a soul would ever survive the drive, but when we got there the place was typically packed. Dismounting from our angry little Malibu, I thought it might be a good time to tell her of a dream I had the previous night, then thought better of it.
In my nocturnal fantasy, Larry met me on a nondescript trail with some sad news. “People would probably be surprised to learn that we don’t have unlimited freedom, so I can’t meet you at Wild Basin tomorrow,” he said. “But I was there just yesterday and I left my rod sixty steps from the Copeland Falls sign behind a tall pine on the right side of the trail. I hope you have good fishing.” And gone.
It wasn’t far down the trail to the sign designating both Lower and Upper Copeland Falls. I was prepared to be disappointed, of course, because dreams are of our own making and others may enter only by our invitation, but I still felt anxious and excited when we approached the pine tree. Of course, the fishing rod was nowhere to be found, behind the tallest pine or any other. “What’s the matter,” Siobhan wanted to know, “you look disappointed.”
“It’s nothing…I just hoped we might see Larry by now,” I said. She pointed out that we’d barely started, unaware of the dream. Just then, a Ranger appeared down the trail, speaking in a loud voice and waving something that looked a lot like a fishing rod. “We just found this a few minutes ago,” the man testified. “Does anyone know of somebody who misplaced a rod? It’s not just any pole, it’s brilliant and unique and nobody would leave it here by accident. Anybody know anything? Come on---help us out!”
I walked up to the Ranger, asked for the rod and looked it over, then handed it back to him with a smile. “Sure, I know who it belongs to,” I told him. “Just put it back where you found it Sunday morning. He’ll be here bright and early to pick it up.”
There are no answers, only mysteries. Maybe that’s a good thing.
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| Above photo: Beaver Brook undulates through Beaver Meadow in the northeastern section of Rocky Mountain National Park. Below, Siobhan on the shore of Bear Lake, elevation 9449 feet. Many of the park's most traveled trails emanate from the popular Bear Lake area. |
That’s all, folks….
