Posts from the “Oddities” Category

Day 47: Ridgway, Colorado

Posted on June 21, 2012

I thought today might be a bit of a bust when our Starbucks “Instant Iced Coffee” with undissolvable non-dairy creamer turned out so pathetically bad. I mean, it wasn’t horrible, I just had to keep reminding myself that it was supposed to be cold.

The drive from the Black Canyon to Ridgway State Park was direct and short, landing us several miles short of the magestic, Alps-like peaks and mountains we had seen in their pictures. The “riverside” desert camping left us seriously wanting, and instead of wasting a day and $18, we pointed the car in the direction of the snow-capped peaks and headed for Ouray.

Stopping in Ridgway for lunch, we found another group of the nicest, most inspiring, interesting, creative, generous, and enthusiastic people… like they had been planted, cast out of hundreds of auditioning actors, for us to meet along the way! We had to laugh when one person after the next took time out of their day to talk to us, share stories, draw maps, offer advice, have a beer, a laugh, a general call to arms of people everywhere: “DON’T LET YOUR LIFE ESCAPE YOU!”

John reminded us to never to go bed angry. Susan thinks that it is us attracting all the goodness to ourselves, that the serendipity is of our own creation. Gary hand drew a map of Ouray and its best trails for us to follow. And taking the advice of the park ranger at Curecanti, who over heard we were fellow South Carolinians, we are now falling asleep to the rushing river below, tucked in amongst the pines clinging to the side of the mountains, overlooking the town of Ouray below. It is perfect.

THE PEOPLE OF RIDGWAY:

Susan: aka Lupita and proprietor of Lupita’s Bizarre Bazaar. She sent us on our way with a silver Buddah saying, “You are very special people. Something always makes my day, and today, that’s you!”

Gary: Member of the Ouray Trail Group. We met at Lupita’s and joined him for lunch at 520 Burger in Ridgway. He is an avid hiker and Telluride skier, oh, and also retired real estate agent (for when we move to Ouray).

Mike and Grace: Dad and daughter duo. Mike is an artist-sculptor who lives and works out of the historic Ridgeway Fire House. He gave us the key to the fairy hot air balloon garden and the Old City Jail.

John, Patrick and the Mustache Man Jim: The men of Billings Artworks. The biker dudes, the self-proclaimed drunken cowboys who make the actual Grammys. Gave us a tour of the place, and let us practice our acceptance speeches holding the real trophies.

John: Sat next to us at the Colorado Boy Pub. An ex-mob man (this could totally be true), a transplant from Brooklyn, and the giver of excellent marriage advice.

Categories: Colorado, Fooooood, Found, Oddities, Restaurant / Bar

Day 39: Hooper, Colorado and the Alien Watch Tower

Posted on June 11, 2012

After the very upsetting “Mule Deer Incident,” we set out north through Colorado. Along the desolate road leaving the Great Sand Dunes there stands an adobe dome, sun catchers and wind chimes clanging in the dusty wind. Without another soul in sight, we parked and walked across the gravelly parking lot, inflatable aliens and flying saucers swinging from the eaves.

Having heard about this extraterrestrial garden from our friend Daniel, we picked our way out into the yard among the nick-knacks left by hundreds of visitors surrounding the alleged vortexes. Two areas of concentrated energy, spinning in opposite directions, have been memorialized in this dusty desert by old key chains and plastic pens, miniature figurines of horses, glass bottles, action figures, and a short green alien holding a welcome sign. We left our own piece of ephemera in the garden, a “Thank You” note the size of a business card that we rolled up and slipped into one of the glass bottles. We also found the NYC metrocard Daniel had left the previous June, tucked amongst the spines of a dead cactus, which we repositioned into a more prominent location.

Categories: Colorado, Farm, Found, Oddities

Day 37: Great Sand Dunes National Park

Posted on June 4, 2012

The time has come to climb the dunes that have been looming over our campsite since we arrived last night. With no marked trails across the ever-shifting sand, we were free to trace our line wherever we pleased. So, always being prime targets for the enthusiastic over-talkers, we chose a steep and twisting climb up to High Peak, the ill named second highest dune in the park.

The hike started out easily enough across the ribbons of the Medano Creek, twisting and knotting their trickling streams across the soft gold sand. Then out across the flat expanse of rocky sand, its pebbles wedging themselves between the soles of my sandals and my increasingly tender feet. Even making it to the point at which the sand turns and marches skyward in long and graceful curves is a hike in itself, but once you have committed yourself to the trek to the top, the real fun begins.

It starts off innocently in sand whose wind-whipped, rippled surface holds your weight, making the ascent of the first few ridges reasonably easy, like walking along the hard, wave packed sand at the edge of the ocean. Hiking along the upper ridges, your feet start to give way below you, sending one foot down the right face and the other down the left, as you traverse the sinuous lip of the dune. But once you leave the relative firmament of the ridgeline, you can just count your further attempts futile.

Trying to scramble, climb on all fours, proceed backwards, crabwalk, crawl, or follow in the footsteps of the idiot who tried this before you, leads only to a final collapse, face down in the soft and red hot sand, panting, imagining scenarios in which the aforementioned idiot meets his end on the opposite side of the dune, probably and hopefully into one of those Star Wars desert sand snakes’ patiently waiting jaws.

Needless to say, I lay in the blazing sun, my pack sitting disappointedly next to me wishing it had a more valiant steed that could in fact carry it all the way to the top of the highest dune. I sat there looking out over the several miles of sand over which we had already trekked, and while Matt continued his attempt to reach the summit, I watched the ant like figures of the people below. When out on the sand, everyone resumes a childlike state, running down the soft faces of one dune after the next, yelling to one another, tossing sand high into the air and watching it settle gently back to earth in a mist of glittering grains. And once Matt climbed out of sight over the crest above where I sat, I did exactly the same.

I galloped down, slipping and sliding, laughing and whooping to myself as I went, falling into the bowl at the bottom. I flopped myself onto the west facing side of the dune, and for the first time since we had set out that morning, the sounds of everyone else, yelling and enjoying themselves, melted away leaving me, the sun, and the sand. I lay there enjoying the moment alone, letting the sun soak into my skin, running the fine grains of sand through my fingers. I took out my book, applied more sunscreen, and waved Matt down when he finally reappeared over the lip of the dune. We lay together on the hot sand enjoying this familiar feeling, reminiscent of days spent on the beaches of Charleston.

We lay there until the sun and the heat became unbearable, and started the return hike, cursing myself once again for wearing sandals despite the signs at the trailhead warning of excessively hot sands at midday. Matt let me wear his absurdly large hiking shoes the rest of the way, and I plunged my poor, burnt feet into the ribbon of water winding sinuously along the edge of the trees. It was far from cold, but it relieved enough of the tenderness for me to slip back into my sandals and limp, sheepishly, back to the parking lot.

We spent the remainder of the blazing afternoon cowering in the tent writing postcards, waiting for the sun to retreat behind the dunes, inviting the stars to the stage. We waited for the night to get inky black, and we set out along the trail back to the open field of sand, tripod, camera, and lantern in hand. We were greeted and welcomed back by a kangaroo mouse eager to get back to the safety of his hole. We took a variety of intriguing photographs before abandoning the camera and laying back down on the now cool sand, turning our faces to the sky above, a celestial dome of navy, glittering with starts in the clearness of the desert air.

Pointing out galaxies, satellites, the Milky Way, we lay there in hopeful anticipation of the ultimate prize for stargazers everywhere. And as we began to feel goose bumps rising on our skin, cold from the sand below, a shooting star ripped through the Big Dipper. We sat there in awed silence before bursting into laughter, congratulating ourselves, and feeling as lucky as ever. We gathered the camera and lantern and headed back to the tent. Another days’ adventure complete…

Categories: Camping, Colorado, Desert, Mountains, National Park, Oddities, Photo, Sunset

Day 33: Petrified Forest National Park

Posted on June 1, 2012

When John Steinbeck wrote Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, he commented on the National Parks of the United States, saying that in them we preserve the oddities of this country, the anomalies. Yellowstone with its boiling mud pits and rainbow colored mineral pools, geysers and grizzly bears. The Grand Canyon, the deepest, widest, largest canyon, cutting a scar across the face of Arizona, a beautiful one, but a scar nonetheless. And my most favorite of all the weirdness, the ridiculous, the absurb, the one and only, PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK.

After refueling on McDonalds coffee and food from the Dollar General (Walmart was too far a drive), we headed to my least anticipated stop of the entire trip, the Petrified Forest, in all its petrified glory. I was actually fairly belligerent, and refused several times to get in the car. I’m not sure what it was about this particular park, but I did not want to go. Ever.

It wasn’t particularly painful, minus the 20-minute, 1970s era, mildly educational video playing on repeat at the Visitors’ Center, also available for purchase at the gift shop. But honestly, I feel sorry for this park, standing here in its strange and otherworldly beauty, as its bits and pieces of history were picked up and pocketed by previous generations of visitors, probably stuffed into drawers, glove compartments, boxes of junk, only to be lost. Two hundred and twenty five million years of time and energy, scattered and lost forever.

The place was unearthly, dunes of rust and gold rising out of a desolate landscape, flat and arid. It was difficult to see these miniature canyons with any sense of perspective, appearing both immense and miniature simultaneously. Matt was trying to recreate a moment he and his brother Jamie shared when they drove across country, from California to South Carolina ten years ago. That day, the light was slipping behind the hills of the Painted Desert around the petrified logs, burning in reds and golds. Today, the sun blazed down on us from directly overhead, the wind whipping our clothes and hair into a frenzy, and the solitude of a moment watching the sun set behind the dunes was lost in the midday heat of the desert.

Categories: Arizona, Desert, National Park, Oddities, Photo

Day 32: Silver City, NM

Posted on May 30, 2012

Silver City, NM, being perched at the southern edge of the forest, was both the front and back door to our trip into the Gila Wilderness. It is a small town with a big heart, and it was on our way here that we had our first run-in with the law…

We hit Highway 25, running north from El Paso, and were stopped by the Border Patrol. This was a routine stop, similar to the many truck weigh stations along I-95, required and unavoidable. We waited in a long line of slowly moving cars and trucks, our faces being read by cameras hooked up to computers, our license plate being run for border crossings into Mexico, and the car being scanned by infrared sensors for warm bodies hidden in the trunk.

We spent the 15 minutes in line thinking up comedic scenarios we could play out for our audience of Border Patrol Agents and fellow drivers:

One of us making a break for it, jumping out of the car and taking off running into the desert until we are apprehended, tazored, and taken into custody for questioning.
Matt driving, and me putting on my sunglasses and tying a bandana around my face like an old timey bank robber, answering all questions in Spanish.
While Matt continues to drive, I hop out of the car and hide in plain sight behind the nearest telephone pole. As Matt and the car creep towards the front of the line, I continue to run from one bad hiding spot to the next, until we are past the check point.
We are actually transporting illegal immigrants hidden under, in, and on top of the many boxes of camping gear in the trunk. We have made little to no effort to hide them, and just ignore the fact that they are clearly visible from anywhere outside the car. The only attempts we have made to disguise them is to give them Mickey Mouse hats and glasses.

By the time we made it to the front of the line our sides hurt from laughing, and we are trying extra hard to be serious in the face of what we are expecting to be a grueling and terrifying interrogation. It goes something like this:

Patrolman: “You both US citizens?”

Matt and Katie (in unison): “Yep!”

Patrolman: “No one else in the car?”

Matt and Katie: “Nope!”

Patrolman: “Alright. You’re good to go.”

Matt and Katie (driving away): “You guys good back there?! Anyone want McDonalds!” (followed by much more laughing and a high five)

After our first brush with the lawmen, we figured a pit stop at the Buckhorn Saloon would be an appropriate beginning to one of our evenings in Silver City, it being an old stomping ground for bank robbers, gold miners, and gun fighters. We stopped here on the first night out of the woods, and the clearly haunted old timey opera house and saloon was the perfect conclusion to our excursion in the wild. We had the best beers of the trip thus far, made sweeter by the four days of hiking, ordered fresh salads and burgers, and talked with Ethan, the bar tender, about life in Silver City. We had AMAZINGLY stopped in on the night they were serving my favorite meal, and ordered a plate of spaghetti to go, which we ate in our tiny hotel room at the Palace Hotel after beers at the local dive bars, Buffalo Bar and Isaac’s.

The next morning, on our way out of town, we ducked into the bookstore next to the hotel and met Dennis O’Keefe, the owner of the shop and local advocate for the Gila, better policing for the delinquent youth of Silver City, and of living life… really living it. We stood there among the shelves of books and dried yucca stalks for an hour and a half, talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and Dennis sent us on our way with advice and one of his photographs of the Gila, in order that we may always remember its best face.

We took Dennis’s advice and stopped to explore the Catwalk, a historic, man made channel for directing water to the town of Graham to operate the electric generators. It came from a pipeline reaching up into the Canyon, and was held onto the rock walls of the Canyon with timbers and iron bars that were in constant need of maintenance. Workmen dubbed it the Catwalk, and today it is operated as part of the Glenwood Ranger District of the Gila National Forest. Today it is a series of suspended metal walkways, over engineered and tethered to the narrow canyon walls. It climbs over boulders wedged into narrow cracks in the canyon, water tumbling out from beneath, and the delicate cottonwood leaves flickering in the gentle breeze. We clammered down off the trail into the shade below the boulders, the stone under foot worn smooth and slick by years of water, of the river, tracing along its face. We sat hidden from the greedy eyes of less patient hikers, watching a small waterfall tumble into the emerald green pool. Leaving my shoes behind, I plunged my feet into the frigid water, soothing twisted ankles and trail weary feet. We sat in the simple silence of two best friends, appreciating the moment away from everything else. We were glad we had come.

From the Catwalk we veered west again, away from the Gila and the wildfires brewing within its dry depths. The smoke that gently wafted above the treeline that day has now grown into the Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire, caused by lightening, and now covering 122,000 acres of the forest. The Gila Wilderness and National Forest is a place where fire is an important part of life, and it is at the forefront of the Forest Service’s testing ground for controlled natural burns and prescribed fires. Every year, fires caused by a combination of summer storms and dry spring conditions are allowed to burn, eating up fuel that if left untouched could cause disastrous fires like those seen in Yellowstone in 1988. (For further reading on the Gila and its fires, highly recommended: Fire Season, Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout)

Categories: Book, Found, New Mexico, Oddities, Photo, Restaurant / Bar, Trails

"The mountains are calling and I must go!"