Fremont Pass

Fremont Pass, named after the American explorer who traveled over it in the 1840s.

When I first came to Colorado, I was struck by how people, at least some people, described their car trips as going over passes rather than naming a route number.  As in, "went over Kenosha Pass" or "lot of snow on Berthoud Pass when I came back" or "went skiing at Careron Pass."  The term comes from the Latin "passus"...meaning step or pace.   So these passes, some of them paved, are routes for going  from one side of a mountain or mountain range to another....from one river basin to another.  

Fremont Pass forms part of the continental divide....on the north side, water flows downhill as the Blue River into the Colorado, flowing west and south for 1,500 miles to the Gulf of California.  It doesn't flow freely as much is contained in ponds to catch runoff from the huge Climax Mine.  The mine extracts molybdenum, used in making high strength steel alloys, and is still the largest such mine in the world.  It has been closed for decades but it due to begin operations again this summer....providing much needed jobs to the town of Leadville on the other side of the pass.  

Climax Mine

The south side of Fremont Pass contains the headwaters of the Arkansas River which flows 1,500 miles east to the Mississippi, thence to the Gulf of Mexico.  The river follows a rift valley past the towns of Leadville, Buena Vista and Salida before rushing down to the Great Plains through the Royal Gorge, a canyon some1,200 feet deep and only 50 feet wide in places.  The headwaters, though, occupy an wide, open valley, gathering snowmelt from the surrounding hills and moutains.  

Headwaters of the Arkansas

I learned about these river basins largely on week-long bike tours, like Ride the Rockies, when biking up (and then speeding down) Fremont and other passes provides the time to put the pieces of mountain geography together.  A mountain pass is a place to pause, to get off the bike or out of the car and look both ways.  Usually one is heading, stepping as the word implies, one way or the other: west to the coast or east to the Mississippi.  But occasionally the pause is an opportunity to ask, "What's the direction I want to go in?"  "Where do I want to go?"  "Which flow of the water do I want to follow?"

The Arkansas beginning its journey east. 

 

Freya and Family

This February has been about family as much as snow.  Family and friends come to share time skiing, going to the hot springs (Mt. Princeton is particularly popular this year), walking through town, and, well, just hanging out at this townhouse on the upper Arkansas River.

More specifically the hanging out during Ingrid and Geoff's visit was hanging out with Freya, now six months.  She turns up in all the photos of people during the time she was here.  The rest of us simply became adjuncts...attending to her moves, her interests, her interactions and her head cold.

She is almost crawling...doesn't quite have the muscle development to get onto her knees.  So she pushes herself with her legs or arms, rolls over, makes swimming motions, grabs for toys, shoes, people.  Clearly a gifted athlete...ready for skis in a few more years.  She can keep herself amused for long stretches without intervention from adults. 

But with a four or five adults to one baby ratio, there is lots of intervention.  "Here let me pick you up,"  "Maybe she wants something to eat." "Let me wipe your nose." "Here, Freya, grab this toy."  "Here, Freya, let's go outside and listen to the sound of the river." "Let's go for a walk."  "Let's wake up Mormor."

 So hanging out with Freya (and giving her parents a chance to snowboard or go to the hot springs) was a gift this month.  Seeing her develop day-by-day, each day a little more agile, each day moving a bit further off the carpet, each day playing with those round plastic toys...or someone's shoes even better...more precisely....this came to represent much of our time.  Freya is progressing so much faster than I am on the moguls at Monarch...But, then, that is why we hang out...seeing where one another is at and getting to know who we are.  Just being.  

Perspectives

 

The mountain landscape through the upper Arkansas Valley is one of open wide vistas and great distance.  It reminds me of the lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay...."the world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide....above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high."  These land forms force us to extend ourselves beyond the confines of streets, towns, highways, buildings...the structures of daily life.  

But the mountains also contain intimate spaces...below tree line are dense forests, places to lose oneself in micro-climates where sight lines are limited.  Sometimes these are in juxtaposition to one another.  I was cross country skiing on a mountain road, enjoying the silence, watching the tread of my skis as the layer of new snow was thin on the gravel surface.  As I came around a bend, I looked up and saw a high mountain wall above the forest...defining the edge of the canyon where I was skiing.  

  This brusque convergence of small-scale and large-scale perspectives is one of the on-going joys of this mountain valley...narrow canyons leading away from the broad ranches on the valley floor. 

Across the River

Across the river from our winter rental is a large industrial building, falling each year into further disrepair.  The building was an engine maintenance facility for the Denver-Rio Grande Railroad.  Salida was founded by the railroad in 1880,  Shortly thereafter, the town became a central transfer and repair center for trains heading south to New Mexico, north to Leadville, west into the San Juans, and east down the Arkansas River canyon to the mills and smelters of Pueblo. 

The texture of the metal sided building, the clerestory with its broken panes, the contours of the water tanks, the colors as they change with the angle of the sun,  these features have always captured me.  An abstract of form, texture, color and shading.

 

 This remnant of the industrial past is a healthy tonic for those who come to Colorado and look at the mountains and who believe that skiing and ranching is all that happened here.  The energy, the smoke, the rail yard rhythms of metal being beaten, of engines being torn apart and being put back together, of workmen and passengers crossing over tracks to change trains...that sense of energy and capital coming together to move, to move, to move people, freight, minerals across the State, the continent.  All that is missing. 

Salida's library has a book on railroads containing a painting of the scene as it looked in the last century.  A train engine running at a good clip past the repair yard.  But now it is quiet on the opposite shore...the only sound is that of the Arkansas River still flowing down to Pueblo and beyond.  

Bike Ride

 

Salida Bike Trail

Yesterday unfolded slowly so in the afternoon, I went for a ride down new paths, new at least for me.  Out into the fields, alongside new developments  ("Craftsman style from the $290s),  along an old ditch carrying water to the farmstead below.   The path was a straight line...cutting west for the Sawatch Mountains...defining connections between places,  people, birds, mountains...

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The Canada geese fly by into fields, recycling their turds back into the soil, taking off to swirl in the skies, looking, always looking, for that greener pasture...all now just shades of brown.  

On the way back into town, I study the wind blowing through the passes on the Sangre de Cristo Range south of town.  Watching the clouds that form as the wind whips through its passes and encounters the warmer air on the eastern slopes.  Feeling glad not to be climbing their heights in this wind.  

Then biking back to town...back to my own species...not unlike the birds...walking through the streets...older folks looking out for younger folks...making them fit for the world.  

And, finally, at not quite the end of the bike ride...just before getting milk at Safeway...sitting for a while over a latte...contemplating how "local" coffee can get given its origin in the tropics.  Some say that roasting at this high altitude gives the beans a certain zipp.  Am not sure about that...but when I got back on my bike, it was with a new clarity as I headed around the block for that milk.  

Flash from the Past

 

 

Working on the Yearbook

OK so it's senior year at North Bergen High School.  I'm sitting around with susan, Iris, Carol and Leslie....are we doing layout or just b.s.ing.  Don't quite know but we do seem to be having a good time.  As we are now planning our (hold your breath) 50th class reunion...you have to be really old to go to one of these.  But it is still fun...albeit a bit more long distance.  Am going to scan more pictures...more from the high school and then from the reunion itself, but I will not bore you with more of these.  Will keep this photo and the others in a more personal account.  All of this is quite before I went on the road.