Our trip to Colorado started off with my cousin’s wedding in Colorado Springs, a very happy family event. After five days of parties and unceasing hospitality, we gave ourselves two weeks holiday (yeah, right, from our stressful lives) and headed off to the Rocky Mountains for some serious walking – and some serious height: living at sea level for a year is not the best preparation for climbing hills at 11,000 feet.
The route took us on a loop up into the Rocky Mountain National Park west of Denver, over the mountains and out the other side down to Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River, then south to ski country, with a few days in upmarket Aspen to get us ready for our return to the Caribbean. It was a fabulous time: the mountains are spectacular, the air is clear, aspen groves stand in meadows of brightly coloured wildflowers, sparkling streams and waterfalls run from lake to lake, cute chipmunks and ground squirrels pose for photos, while in town a herd of elks graze the municipal rose bushes – but best of all, almost no other people! Colorado is twice the size of England, but has only 4 million inhabitants, most of whom live in Denver, so there is wilderness aplenty.
What were the highlights? A day’s white water rafting and kayaking on the Colorado River, down the spectacular Glenwood Canyon. As Anthony said half way, why haven’t we done this before? The rafting is fun and wet, but very easy, but the kayaking is hard work, particularly with the wind blowing us back up the canyon. The Canyon itself is stunning, even though only a fraction of the depth of the Grand Canyon, it is still breath-taking, the steepness, the multi coloured layers of rocks, red and cream and grey, the railroad balanced precariously on one side, with the telegraph poles leaning out over the river because there’s not space for both them and the train.
We went to a couple of genuine rodeos, with bucking broncos, mutton busting (like a bucking bronco, but the participants are one small child and one large and very woolly sheep), and vast plates of barbequed ribs and beans to eat. We sang The Star Spangled Banner, and God Bless the USA, and had the cowboy’s prayer read out, and Miss Rodeo galloped round the arena wearing a red white and blue shirt, carrying a US flag, and every man took their hat off and held it over their heart, and it all felt thoroughly patriotic.
Then there was barrel racing, and bull riding (really, you would have to be mad to want to do this), and lassoing steers, as well as team roping, and a stampede with all the smalls chasing a bunch of bullocks round to try to get ribbons off their tails. After the rodeo there was a camp fire singalong, with children toasting marshmallows on pointy sticks – and, once again, not a safety elf to be seen. We are told in the UK that our safety culture is imported from the US, but so far we haven’t seen any sign of it; in all our travels of the past year, the UK is the most heavily regulated place we’ve been to.
If we had a favourite town, it would have been Redstone, where we stayed in a lovely motel, the Redstone Cliffs Lodge, which felt just as friendly and homely as the best sort of B&B. The tiny town of Redstone (population 92 as it states proudly at the entrance) was originally built as a model village for workers in the nearby mines in Marble (where, with the local literalness that names towns Gypsum, Basalt and Aspen, the marble for the Lincoln Memorial was quarried, and blindingly white chunks are still scattered around as kerb markers). The town has been renovated and is a most peaceful and beautiful place, either for striking out into the Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, or for just sitting and watching the aptly named Crystal River. The hiking from here was different from the National Park, more open, with meadows of wildflowers flowing down valleys.
Another place we would have been really sorry to miss, though it is not an obvious part of any tourist itinerary, was the Chapel of the US Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. It is a modernist building, of steel, concrete and aluminium, with 17 spires all along the roof ridge, designed to look like a series of jets taking off into the skies. It sounds a bit corny, but the impression is of strength, simplicity and spirituality. For me, it must be one of the most successful buildings from the 1960s; its concrete and steel still clean, the fine lines reaching almost to infinity, the interior unmarked by stains of water or rust. It seems to embody all the dreams that people first had when they started to use these new materials, with their strength, purity and lack of restrictions, before they got sidetracked into tower blocks and the National Theatre. Inside the chapel, a cross hangs over the altar, so fine that you barely see it at first, the vertical like a long rapier, the cross-piece subtly shaped like two soaring wings. A place of hope, aspiration, dedication, and belief in a something greater than oneself, and in a life that can raise itself above the lowest common denominator.
President Obama’s health care reforms were hotly debated everywhere we went, with everybody having a view: mainly that something needed to change from the present system. The NHS was widely referred to by polemicists, usually unfavourably – and usually inaccurately. Did you know that if life-saving treatment costs more than £25,000 every six months, it is automatically rejected by the NHS? No, me neither.
I came across an excellent book in one motel’s library: “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan. A fascinating account of the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s, and the completeness of the man-made ecological disaster that overtook that part of the plains. I had thought it was just a bit of earth that got a bit dry, but had no idea that dust clouds swept the country as far as Washington, blotting out the sun, that all the topsoil simply vanished over an enormous area, around 150,000 square miles – three times the size of England, that when the dust storms were blowing cars stopped dead and you couldn’t see far enough to make it back from the barn to the house. The book also shows how appallingly the Americans of that time treated the plains Indians, repeatedly making and breaking treaties with them, pushing them further and further into smaller patches of land, destroying their lives and the buffalo that they herded.
By the time the failures in farming techniques were recognised, the buffalo were gone, the Indians were gone, the topsoil and the prairie grass that had held it in place were gone, and nothing to show for it. A very cinematic book, full of visual images: the buffalo wandering freely over the plains, the dust pouring through the cracks in the log cabin’s walls, dust clouds towering up out of a summer Sunday afternoon, and those who remained coughing themselves to death from dust pneumonia.
I don’t want to end on this depressing note, so leave you on the Continental Divide trail, on the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific. We have stopped at Independence Pass, at 12,095 feet, on our way out of the Aspen Valley, and walked for a mile or two over the harsh dry tundra, intrigued by the patterns the lichen makes on the rocks, and finding tiny blobs of colour where the hardy relation of a flower we know from meadows lower down has scraped a toe-hold. The view stretches away in all directions; down to the ghost town of Independence, way over to Mount Sopris on the far side of Aspen, and over the mountains in the east towards where the high plains start again. Anthony has decided to run along a ridge, past a pair of unperturbed Dusky Grouse; he moves far faster than I do in this thin air, and has just whooped to draw my attention to him, standing it seems on tiptoe on a little pinnacle, silhouetted against the mountains that roll on behind him, master of all he surveys.
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