In the mountains

I drove up to Buena Vista over Kenosha Pass for a few days in the mountains. Crossing the pass into the huge open snow covered space of South Park is always dramatic. Urban life is left 4,000 feet below on the front range. It is quite unlike the drive up I-70 and through the Eisenhower Tunnel where urban and commercial sprawl follow you over the Divide. The drive over Kenosha brings you into a different world.

I stayed at the Cottonwood Hot Springs, sharing the loft in the dorm room with Tim. He was living further up along Cottonwood Creek at 11,000 feet. He is in a camp tent for the winter, wood stove for heat, and working on a house he is building at the mouth of an abandoned mine. The land is part of a mining claim he bought a few years back. His claim is three miles up the mountain; he gets there by snowshoe or snowmobile depending upon the weather. When he has business in town, he spends the night at the Hot Springs where he works in exchange for board. His wife, not too surprisingly, is living in Texas. We share evening and morning conversation and coffee in the lounge. I marvel at the ways people come to create a life for themselves.



But I had come up mainly for alpine skiing. I'm not sure what I love the most: the sensation of swooshing downhill over fresh powder (like gliding on silk) or the simple feeling of being high in the snow covered mountains at places where only lifts or snowcats can bring you. Ski Cooper, outside of Leadville (highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet), was just opening for the season. The sides of the groomed trails were three to four feet deep in powder. And if the lifts seem slow (this ain't Vail), they give you a chance to take in the spare beauty of the far mountain ranges and the simple pleasure of being outside in the snow on a bright sunny Colorado day.

Public Space

On my last day in DC, I visited the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, the most astonishing public space in the capital. It was built after the Civil War to house the pension offices for the veterans and civil servants. Now receiving a pension (probably from a computer system housed in some cubicle-laden dreary office complex), I feel a deeper affinity with this magnificent edifice...its gigantic columns lifting the roof skyward. Groups of school children come into the space and sit or lie on the floor with their teachers looking up, up, up.

One of the exhibits on display in the columned interior was on the history of the parking garage. And one of the statistics cited dealt with the period before the advent of the automobile when cities were filled with workhorses carrying people and goods. It is estimated that in New York in 1900, the city held about 100,000 horses which produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of, most of it probably dumped into the river. Now that was an environmental pollution problem. So the automobile was responsible for cleaning up the city, parking garages replacing stables.

Ahhh....magnificent museums...places for learning and gaining perspective in space and time.

The National and Other Galleries

One of the joys of urban life is being able to move through its collections of art and architecture. In Washington for a few days, I was able to catch a few of the new exhibits at the National Gallery...small French paintings on one floor of the East Wing and photography in the West Wing. Walking through the vast public spaces of the museum is always a treat...as much for the paintings on the wall and the sculptures on the floor as for catching the manner in which people interact with the art, how they become part of the exhibit themselves, how they add color and light and movement to the art, blurring the lines between themselves and the objects.



Earlier this year, I made a trip (pilgrimage?) to Chaco Canyon, the site of extensive Anasazi ruins in northwest New Mexico. The isolated canyon contains the largest collection of Pueblo sites north of Mexico...sites that were used up until the mid 1100's when drought caused the massive migration out of the region toward the Rio Grand valley.



The same creative impulse to communicate through forms and shapes is found on the canyon walls and in the now-deserted plazas. They communicate a sense of place beyond the place itself. The images chiseled into the canyon walls, the doorways opening onto doorways, the design of rock walls all indicate a universality in the human desire to move us beyond our day to day existence.