Colorful Colorado

Colorful Colorado lives up to its name. Ten minutes from where I’m staying is Red Rock Open Space with its varied colored sand and gravel trails. The signature red rocks form a ridge like a dinosaur’s back moving over the countryside toward Garden of the Gods whose dynamic rock formations draw visitors from all over the world. 

Sport climbing routes run up some of the faces and when I go for a walk, I often stop and watch climbers scurry upward equipped with their ropes, carabiners, climbing shoes, and chalk.

If I go far enough, sometimes I have a trail to myself with nothing but the sound of birds or the wind in the trees and a view that rests my soul.

The trails wind and intersect—Greenlee Trail, Mesa Trail, Quarry Pass Trail, Contemplative Trail, Roundup Trail, Hogback Valley Trail, Red Rock Canyon Path—and this summer I’m learning them and their ways. As I do, I feel wilderness advocate John Muir’s words to my core, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”1

Approximately forty miles east of Colorado Springs is the Paint Mines Interpretive Park. Named for the clays that the Native Americans used to make paint, the clay and sandstone hoodoos (as the formations are called) have layers of color; pink, purple, white, orange. Signs of oxidation, signs of change, signs of geological history. Who came here first? Were they as delighted as I am to walk among the rocks?

 

Less than twenty minutes another way, I am at North Cheyenne Cañon Park. There I see the smooth gray face of Helen Hunt Falls; a 35-foot waterfall (named after the poet, writer, and activist for Native Americans and not after the actress). After I take the more tourist-calling trail to the Falls’ overlook and admire the vista, I’m not quite finished wandering so I venture up the Columbine Trail upward toward the top of Gold Camp Road. Hummingbirds buzz and chase each other away. 

A woodpecker gives me the eye. I stop a million times to rejoice in the views, to smell the charming scent of pine, to feel the breeze as it travels past. Colors of blue and green turn purple in the distance, intermix with gray and brown. Tiny bursts of wildflower brightness, orange and red and yellow catch my eye. A large, bright yellow bird lands in a tree but flies away again before I can get a clear picture of it. The mountains are underneath my feet and all around me. Muir also said, “going to the mountains is going home” and “wildness is a necessity.”2 These things feel as true to me as the heady breathlessness of the high-altitude air.

Heading west, less than an hour away, are the Florissant Fossil Beds. Petrified tree stumps from Redwood trees that used to tower two or three hundred feet high now are turned from wood to rock, nothing of their former nature remains except the shape. A Park Ranger tells me that if I had a blowtorch turned up to 2000 degrees, the rock would melt into a pool of glass as it’s basically very hardened sand. 

 

Here too, wildflowers color the grass—Indian Paintbrushes, Blue Flax, Golden Smoke, Pasque Flower, Fire Weed, Stemless Locoweed—and the distant mountain peaks don’t get justice in a photo. How could I capture beauty such as this? The moody sky casts the grass in all tones of green. A soft drizzle starts up. Feeling lucky to have a friend with me and a cool day for lots of walking, I don’t notice the cold until my fingers start to tingle with pins and needles. Back at the car, I put my sweatshirt on and revel in the adventure of it all.

 

There are trips for the taking. So many more. Colorful Colorado, where to next? My list is long and time is short. I’ll see as much as I can before the summer ends. For as Muir said in a letter to his sister, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quotes taken from this website:

https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

1 Our National Parks , 1901, page 56.

2 Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1.

3 Letter to sister Sarah Galloway, September 3,1873, in Life and Letters of John Muir, Chapter 10 (1923).

 

 

Out in the World

I’m facedown, cradled in a harness sleeve, hands holding onto shoulder straps, feet pressed against a white, plastic bar to keep my body in a horizontal line. As the winch winds me up and upward, twenty feet, thirty, fifty, seventy, from somewhere in my gut a strong desire for survival sends me an SOS message and makes me think, “Maybe this is a bad idea. Is it too late to abort?” 

But I don’t shout down to the two staff members below to unhoist me.  

Eighty feet. 

Is it too late to stop this?

From below, one of the staff shouts, “Three, two, one, fly!” 

No more time to think, I pull the rip cord and drop.

A shriek escapes me and then as I swing out over the Royal Gorge, I let out a whoop.

Pendulum swinging back and forth, over the open mouth of the canyon, over the ride’s platform, back and forth. I try to take in the views, try to remember the terror that turned into thrill with that free fall. It all goes to memory so quickly.

It must be the terror that makes me feel alive. The toeing of the line between safe and unsafe. The testing of what I can make myself do. How far will I go? How high? The exhilaration of doing a frightening thing, of not aborting. The thrill of having done something scary and survived it.

“Next time back, grab the loop,” one of the staff calls up to me, holding a long handle with a rubber loop at the end which reminds me of a snake catcher.

As I oscillate one final time over the canyon, I loosen my fingers and prepare to reach for the loop. “Grab it and don’t let go,” I’d been told. Coming in, I grab hold, the staff member plants her feet against the pull, and between our combined effort I’m brought to a stop. They wheel the metal platform underneath me.

“You can take your feet off the bar and stand up,” one of the staff says, and so I do. They unhook the cables from the sleeve and I go, grinning, down the platform steps. 

Adventure (or is it the end of an adventure?) puts a smile on my face.

“How was it?” a third staff member asks.

“Exhilarating,” I say.

The staff member inside the Skycoaster hut helps me out of the sleeve and I go toward the exit desk to look through the pictures taken while I flew.

It’s strange to be out among the world again. It’s like being brought to waking life after having been in hibernation for a year-long winter. And while that hibernation was full of good things, it’s nice to move around, to stand in front of yet another of the friendly staffers while he tells me all the local must-see areas, pulls out his phone to show me videos, and prints off a photo of me suspended in the open air as an unasked-for gift.

Out again in the world, where I can go in search of views, walk among the rocks or trees, dream of distant mountains, and fly high above canyon rivers.

Unharnessed now and out in the world to fly.