Clouds

Clouds form an infinite variety of shape and color to the west as the sun settles beyond the Cochetopa Hills.  A small group stands on the back porch of Oak House watching the slow transformations, the unfolding of patterns.  Some, like me, have cameras...catching the moments, trying to somehow freeze and possess the spectacle.  Others only watch..someone has forgotten her camera...a good thing she says since she must now concentrate on each movement...like listening to a symphony instead of taking pictures of the orchestra.

 Sometimes, though, you have to pull back and take in more of the sky, more of the land.  The San Luis Valley here is about 30 miles across from the western foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountais to the early eastern slopes of the San Juans.  The sagging boards of the back porch are attached to those eastern foothills...we think of ourselves as being high above the valley floor but behind us the snow covered peaks rise another 6,000 feet.  Keeping perspective is not easy.

 And then the final drama...the final rays of the sun spread red, gold across the sky.  Behind us these bands of color reflect off the high mountain snows, hence the name for the range as "the blood of Christ."  Ahhh...those early Spanish explorers were so tormented.  And how, in turn, they tormented the those who had been living here prior.  Yet the earth continues its daily spin...spinning the cloud formations as it turns.  Turning us on the back porch away from the sun...moving us into the darkness of the night sky.

Coal Camp

Sugarite Canyon State Park is located just east of Raton Pass where Colorado crosses into New Mexico.  The park holds the source of Raton's water supply and the ruins of a coal mining camp.  The camp was founded around 1894 and continued to operate until 1941.  The camp produced coal for domestic use.



The camp was actually a substantial community, housing up to 1,000 people, with school, post-office, baseball teams, household gardens, and the company store.  Miners were immigrants from Italy, the Balkans, Japan...and local Hispano families.  Their houses were substantial...impressive ruins of house foundations neatly line the hillsides.  To the east of the canyon, small farms and ranches supplied food stuffs, meat and other produce to the mining families. It was hard, dangerous work...to cut down on the coal dust, a cause of explosions, water was sprayed in the mine.  The water was cold...men often worked while standing in cold water up to their knees...at least five were killed during the time the mine operated...those who got injured simply lost their jobs, but the company had a doctor on site. 



It helps to be reminded of how difficult life has been for so many people.

Of course part of the reasons for closure may also have been that the coal was marked under the Swastika brand....a brand name most unfortunate in a country about to go to war with Hitler.  "High in heat, low in ash" just didn't cut it.  Where were the advertising mad men when we needed them? 

Denver

Catching a 6:00 am flight from Dullas to Denver, giving me a morning in the city before heading to Santa Fe, checking in with a friend, having an early lunch at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant on Colfax...  Ahh, the air is dry.  The sun shines.  I feel like I am back in "my" part of the country. 

Washington again....

We took the train from Providence to Washington to see Tom, Halie, Robin...more offspring.  A quick side-trip to Annapolis to check in with family including a musical interlude with Tony. 

I found a few afternoon hours to take one of the bike-share cycles down to the Washington Mall to visit the museums...but which one?  Ahhh...the range of artistic experience in the capital's museums....endless.  More endless than the need to find shade from the summer's high heat and humidity.

So just a short time to check out the Hirshorn...an exhibit on "time and space" featuring wall-size video screens of an elephant moving slowly in a bare museum gallery...and then part of the permanent collection. 


 

 

 

Getting reacquainted with paintings viewed in art books and, many decades ago, in art history courses.  Edward Hopper, Joan Miro...attempts to express life, movement, on canvas. 

Freya

Freya Marie Werge Whitehead, last names sometimes combined as Wergehead, was born to my daughter Ingrid August 11 in Rhode Island.   What more to say.  Another leaf, then twig, then branch on the tree of life.  Beautiful, amazing, "best baby in the whole world" according to the mother. 

Sharing her first week.  Observing that over the course of three-four days her learning that if she opened her eyes and...here's the hard part...kept them open, she could see things.  And, also, that she could focus...though as I left she would really only focus when she heard her mother, saw her, smelled her milk.  And as I and Charlotte would hold her for times, I realized just how many songs I knew...melodies for Freya as the different parts of her brain began making those initial connections.  So sweet. 

 

 

We will be seeing more of Freya in the future. 

Catching Up

Rain fell most of the night but morning has dawned clear.  Am looking over the San Luis Valley from the Orient Land Trust hot springs...writing in the administration building.  I have taken a day and a half to see if I can let my soul catch up with my body. 

I've been moving through space at a fast clip: driving back from San Francisco, going to cousin's wedding in Vail, camping with one grandchild in Colorado, seeing a new grandchild in Rhode Island, visiting sons in Washington, DC, flying back and camping at Raton Pass, going to meetings and the opera in Santa Fe...now on my way home.  But stopping first to collect my thoughts and impressions...taking time to make them part of myself, not just surface experiences that will slough off as I go through the next months. 

I'll just share a few impressions of some of the people and places...not necessarily in chronological order...ruminations as I've rested on the air mattress in my tent, sorting out these days, listing to the sound of rain on roof, keeping warm and dry under my poncho. 

The bay, the ocean

So here I sit in Vail Colorado....trying to have my soul catch up with my life...and thinking of where I left off my last post.  We were heading west...and we made it to Larkspur, a small old hippy town on the San Francisco Bay.  Visiting friends, taking the ferry across the bay to the city, riding some of the best bike trails in the country, feeling the soothing calm of fog which, like snow, slows everything down.  We stayed four days.  Time to get reacquainted with old friendships, urban streets, and water.  So little in Colorado and here, along the bay, water just hangs in the air.  

Windsurfing must just be a variant on the impulse to go fast on the earth's surface...as old, perhaps, as running through tall grass chasing an animal, seeking the meat.  But now just the sense of movement for its own sake. And perhaps the road trip has something in common....moving through space with a purpose, maybe without a purpose.  

Across the Great Basin

The Great Salt Lake Basin....under the blazing sun and into the brilliant white reflection from the salt, folks walk out to test its substance.  I could not stand the burning rays more than a few minutes.   On the way, we had passed at least two cars that had ventured off the highway to test their ability to drive on its surface.  Both were immediately mired in sand beneath of hard baked surface....we gave them a "tsk, tsk" as we sped by on the paved surface. 

But, then, beyond this flat land drive, the western hills emerge.  Nevada that funny antithesis of Mormon Utah...maybe not funny, maybe sad, to judge from the faces of slot machine players early the next morning in Elko.  After getting my own smart phone, I could sympathize easier with those folks who seemed frozen, visually stupified, by the rolling lights, the loud "ching, ching", the constant stimulation, the jarring lights of the uncrowded casinos.  So much to occupy the neural pathways...so many synapses to load at one time...so many ways to lose active consciousness. 

Road trip

 

Charlotte and I decided to take a road trip west...a time "to bond" given that this fall will see her on the East Coast for extended periods of grandmothering.  We called friends in California, planned a short stay, and headed northwest to Wyoming, then west on I-80.

  

Day one we came to Green River...the place where John Wesley Powell started down river in his 1869 exploration of the Colorado.  He rode out from Chicago on the just finished Union Pacific railroad whose tracks still carry the weight of rail cars.  In the picture above, a line of cars can be seen just on the far side of the river. The interstate runs parallel to the railroad in most places.  Where rivers run, the railroad rides its banks...skirting the deeper canyons where necessary.  The railroad follows earlier wagon wheel roads...pioneer wagon trains needed water to survive.  Railroad engines needed water to create the steam to pull the passenger and cargo cars.  So the trip is one of geography and history...even if automobile drivers, tuned into their Sirius satellite radios fail to notice.  

 

Mosquito Pass or rather Mosquito No Pass

 

A made-up day.  Got up around 5:30, put on some clothes, walked down to the admin building, made some coffee, sent out a blog, caught up on email....   Car battery dead but OLT is used to that happening all the time so they just rode me up a charger and it turned right over.  

Decided to drive to Leadville...on the way, studied the maps, and decided to go home over Mosquito Pass....a 4 wheel drive road that extends from 7th street Leadville to Alma on the road between Breckenridge and Fairplay.   I knew the lower part of the Mosquito Pass Road, having used cross country skis to make tracks this past winter.  So I headed up and up...

And the vistas opened and then opened again.  Amazing. 

But that did not happen to the road, however, which was the width of my vehicle in places.  A road of rocks...granite boulders...ain't no biking lane here....

 

It was just around the bend on the photo below that I came to a snow drift whose depth I could not fathom and over which no tires had ever passed.  A sense of relief because I was beginning to doubt if the Explorer was really up to it...e.g.  what is its history on tipping over on high mountain passes? 

 

On the way back down I stopped at an old mining operation....tailings from mining tunnels dot the lower hillsides.   This was The Diamond Mine.  Don't know what they found....probably I could find out from histories and old records in the town hall.   For now it's just stuff rusting away under a hot sun.   Oh well, time to take another road home (hey how about I-70?)

Watching the weather

Distant thunder rolled down the pass in the late morning.  From the back porch, you can see slow dark clouds pulling a narrow line of rain across the valley floor.  Like a gigantic gray shower curtain.  The clouds come out of the north-west, not a massive storm this...just some drops for a very dry land.  

The back porch has a few metal chairs.  No pillows.  No dynamic other than the sight of clouds, forming and reforming, thunder rolling louder.  At first a scent of rain.  Then a few drops.  Then more.  Then hail.  Not everyone was watching...some folks caught up in the day to day, e.g., gotta get the tent up...alas a bit too late. 

And then it is over...sun comes back.  A group of three sisters occupy the front porch...having an annual get together...playing cards, eating cherries, laughing...enjoying being with one another.  Enjoying the day.  No rain can dampen this party. 

My writings have become more peripatetic of late.  I continue to write in my journal, if not daily, every few days to capture the experience and try and make some sense of it..  But to blog requires some combination of photograph and narrative that requires a kind of story line.  And these lines seem to become tangled at times.   

And which is why, after only having finished my Bike Tour of Colorado (55, 66, 84 and 91 miles…the longest day was my best), I spent a week at home.  Then came back up to the mountains.  Spent the night at the hostel in Salida…wandered downtown in the early evening…got some ice cream at Safeway.  In the morning, I got to the Café Dawn around 6:30.   Ordered my latte then went outside again to take a picture on this patriotic 4^th of July…and into the viewfinder walked Steve and Tamara…owners of the house I had rented this past February.  Salida...a small town.   

Then onto the Orient Land Trust….checked in….set up my tent on a slope open to the wind to cut down on mosquitoes.  Spent time in the sauna, the swimming pool, the party pool, the top pool, and the newly accessible Meadow Pool.  There is a natural quality to the pools here...the way they are constructed...low rock walls holding the water heated by deep faults in the earth.  It is not crowded...this week after the 4th...no fireworks here.  Just pools that you can have by yourself...you, the pool, the hillside and the valley beyond. 

  

A long time...a long road

 

Riding a bicycle in the Rockies you never know what to expect.   The third day of the Bicycle Tour of Colorado meant cycling from the town of Granby to Steamboat...about 84 miles...mostly uphill against a hot headwind.   I admit to being unprepared....not keeping hydrated enough, not carrying enough food between the aid stations, not having trained.   Still it beat the previous day.

The route the day before was Trail Ridge Road, the legendary highway through Rocky Mountain National Park.  The road tops out just above 12,000 feet.   On the morning of the ride, the road was closed due to a snow storm.  Many of the cyclists, however, hoped it would open later in the day.  We all sat around Estes Park High School (where we had camped the night before) and waited for news.  

Not me.  I had ridden the road three times before in good weather.  I knew about hypothermia.  So when the aid stations 1 and 2 were open along the route, but the road remained closed, I chose to sag in one of the ride's vans.  While sagging can mean "to droop from pressure,"  in this case it meant "stay alive."

The road finally opened around 10:30 am...in part because the cyclists massed behind the road's closed gates were suffering from the cold.  Of course some did not realize that the closed gates were still below tree line and that shortly after they would be exposed to the full blasts of wind, sleet, snow, and rain.  So they rode on. As they got above tree line, sleet covered their glasses so that many could not see the road (only the white line going down the middle), hoping they would not collide with cars.  Hands froze...they could not feel the grip of the hand brakes.  The cold broke through whatever covering they had (one fellow with whom I talked had worn his kayaking gear....he could not stop shaking).

The snow banks along the side of the road were, at times, 15 feet high. 

As our van drove by them, I felt something like a voyeur....watching a kind of sport porn that was painful to look at.  At the highest aid station, vans and trucks filled with cyclists who could not go any further....and with some who warmed up and then headed on.   The rumor was that once you got off the high pass the sun would be shining all the way to Granby.  Not true.  It pelted rain once the cyclists got below the snow and sleet.  

So it was a quiet evening that night at the camp ground surrounding the high school in Granby.  The clouds cleared.  Most of the cyclists had sagged...taking buses from Estes Park over Berthoud Pass...an alternative route across the continental divide.  But they also were quiet after a memorable ride....even for those who deserted their bikes for a seat in a warm vehicle.  

But we all had stories to tell.  We just talked real quiet.    

And the Arts

But Washington is a city of the arts and formal culture.  The Smithsonian with its 19 free museums provides an overwhelming choice of exhibits, objects, interactive environments.   So one walks from the outdoor sculpture gardens to an exhibit of Southern Indian bronzes to a show of contemporary native American painting and craft to Chinese cave art from the early Buddhist periods. 

 

 

All seen within a single space...museums connected by underground passages.  I had been reading a history of Venice and, then, in the National Gallery, an exhibit of the Venetian painter, Canaletto and his rivals...paintings of the scenes I had been reading about.  The museums bring the world to you....ok, kind of out of context, but a lot closer than the words in a book. 

 

And the art of a more political nature...the memorials to past presidents, historic figures, and wars (lots of memorials to wars and, yet, it is the memory of peace that needs to be preserved).   Washington occupies a central space in our political psyche...but also as a repository for part of our aesthetic sensibility.  

 

 Of course, other forms of art abound....the brightly painted hotdog stands for example.  Art with a more commercial and utilitarian bent.  Still one is as valid as the other...and often more fun, if not enlightening.