Rocky Mountain Roadtrip

This is Rocky Mountain National Park, where I took my roadtrip a few weeks ago. The upside to taking a roadtrip to a place like this can be seen by looking at the picture: Awe-inspiring beauty. The downside to taking a roadtrip to a place like this is that in between here and there lay west Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, or hundreds of miles where the phrase "awe-inspiring beauty" rarely applies.
So I left on a Friday, which was marathon driving day. I stopped only twice: Once for lunch and gas at Little Rock, and again for dinner and gas somewhere in far west Oklahoma. Once past Oklahoma City you're into the Great Plains, which in its own way is kind of beautiful. One of my best friends grew up in far western Texas, and when he came to visit Nashville he couldn't get over how many trees there were here. I kind of have the opposite reaction out west - so much open space; a limitless horizon. I made it as far as Amarillo, Texas, where the high plains meets the desert, to spend the night.
On Saturday I drove a few more hours northwest across the high desert of New Mexico and into Colorado, arriving in Denver around lunchtime. When I was looking for jobs at the end of graduate school, Denver was my number one choice; Nashville, number two. However, the job market was much better in Music City so I came here. Part of me still wonders what life would be like if choice #1 had come through. Most of me is happy it turned out the way it did.
Sunday morning was spent at Boulder Valley Church of Christ. They had a wonderful outdoor service that morning, on the lawn facing across the valley to the Front Range. I then spent a couple of hours walking around downtown Boulder before heading up into the mountains.
Up the canyon from Boulder, barely ten miles out of town, you get to Boulder Falls (picture on the left), which is just off of the highway. After a short break here I wound my way over the Front Range and ended up at the south entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park at a little village called Grand Lake.

Right outside of Grand Lake I spent Sunday night in a resort which has several "rustic" cabins spread throughout the woods. Rustic means no television or telephone. They do have electricity and running water. Those are my limits of rusticity. Also throughout the woods were signs warning of attacks by mountain lions and bears. To my disappointment, I saw neither. My wildlife sightings would be limited to elk and mountain goats. The picture below is a view of the village of Grand Lake from the cabin property. Not much to do here at night except sit out on the front porch and read, which I did until it got too cold outside.

The next couple of days were spent exploring inside the park. There is one main highway across the park called the Trail Ridge Road. There is also an old dirt road, originally built back in the 1920s, that winds it way up to meet with the main highway near Fall River Pass, which sits at an elevation of about 11,800 feet. I never hiked too far off of the roads. For one, I'm not big on backcountry hiking alone, and second my sea-level lungs do not at all enjoy hiking at 10,000 feet elevations. Anyway, what follows are some pictures that I took along the way.

This is at the western edge of the park, looking west just after sunset. Though it probably doesn't show up here, I really liked the way the lighting turned out. By the way, I took the picture standing on a bridge over the Colorado River, a few miles from its headwaters. Here the river is about as wide as Otter Creek just below Radnor Lake.

To the right is the Trail Ridge Road near its highest elevation of 12,183 feet. The road spends a lot of time above treeline, and on the northern exposures there was still some snow. I also saw, as mentioned earlier, elk and mountain goats, but unfortunately no bears or lions or other dangerous creatures.

On the left is the climb up the Old Fall River Road. Nine miles long, it is unpaved and consists mostly of the switchbacks you see here. Beautiful scenery, however.

There on the right is Alberta Falls, the largest waterfall I saw on my journey. It is formed by water from a melting glacier higher up the mountain. This was part of my longest hike on the trip. At the end of it I think I knew what it feels like to have emphysema.

Finally, the first of the Colorado pictures were on a roll that had sat in my camera forever, and turned out to have a few forgotten Italy pictures. Happy times. So this last picture is nowhere near Colorado but is of Como, in the Alps in the northern part of the country.

P.S. Did not realize until this second that you could click on the pictures and get a larger version. Go Blogger!

List of the Week

Things, Other Than a Sluttily-Dressed Middle Aged Woman's Gigantic Butt at a Coldplay Concert, That Might Cause Blindness, But With Far Less Psychological Trauma

1. The sun
2. Lasers
3. A pack of rabid monkeys mistaking your eyeballs for a pair of juicy mangos
4. Sulfuric acid
5. Carelessly disregarding your wire mesh mask when facing an overenthusiastic and/or particularly ruthless fencing opponent
6. A BB gun
7. An overdose of viagra
8. Decapitation
9. Two precisely tossed hypodermic needles
10. The blackness of the outer reaches of hell, caused by the complete absence of God

Too Much Sky

Like every other morning of the world, I slept until the last possible moment. I need to be at school for class by about 8:15, so I give myself about fifteen minutes to get ready and fifteen more to drive in to school. This leaves no time for turning on the radio or the television.
I grab my backpack and rush to my car. Like every other morning in Houston it is sunny, hot and sauna-humid. My shower has been negated by the time I reach the car. I get in, turn on the engine, and get ready to pull out as the radio comes on.
What blares out of my speakers is a woman screaming over and over: "My God! My God! My God!". It is 8:03 am. Slightly shocked at the chaos on the radio I make my way towards the school. The woman won't stop screaming. There are more screams in the background, and a reporter blubbering, not making any sense, something about a plane crash.
At first I think it is here in Houston, and from the sound of it in a heavily populated area. I actually check the horizon for smoke as I scan the stations to get a clearer idea of what was going on. Over the course of the fifteen minute drive, and after cycling non-stop through a dozen radio stations, it becomes clear that it is not here, but in New York City, and there is more than one crash, and it may not be accidental.
Once I get to the school I go straight to the breakroom, where there is a television. Everyone else is there, and no one is speaking. The World Trade Center towers have been hit with planes. Flames engulf the upper floors.
The decision is made to keep on with class. The day's first lecture: "Fires and Explosions in the Operating Room." I stay in class for about ten minutes, then leave for the breakroom. I cannot not watch the television. During the time away another plane crashes into the Pentagon. Another plane on its way to Washington goes down in Pennsylvania. The news says other planes are missing. Maybe other cities are targets.
I watch as the towers go down, still the most surreal and unimaginable sight I have ever witnessed. A classmate is in tears. Her fiance is in New York for business. His client's office is in the towers. It is not until several hours later that she learns that the hotel he normally stays at, the Marriott next to the WTC, had made a mistake and he had to be booked in a hotel far uptown in Times Square. A chronic oversleeper, the extra commute made him late for work. He was about to walk into the tower went the plane struck. He ran for his life, and made it away safely.
Some of my best friends live in NYC. I couldn't think of any reason why they would have been in lower Manhattan that day. Fortunately I was right, though it would be several hours before I knew.
Within the next few minutes we are sent home. The Texas Medical Center has been deemed a potential target, and we are told to evacuate. The barricades go up behind me as I drive off to a friends house where we spend the rest of the day with others just watching the news.

I can still remember most every detail of that day. It caused a mixture of emotions that before then I really never thought I'd feel. It was like the foundations had shifted, that what you took for normal was gone and was never coming back. It was an overwhelming sadness. I was stunned by the capacity for evil, and stunned again by the capacity for compassion in the aftermath. I remember feeling anxious the first time I saw a commercial jet flying low over downtown Houston. I remember being incredibly happy when Fox finally ran a Simpsons rerun instead of continuous news coverage - a bit of normalcy had returned. I remember feeling a dark, extremely un-Christian hatred toward the hijackers, whose misunderstanding of their God would be completely laughable if the results had not been so tragic. I remember a few public prayers for the leaders of Al-Qaida, praying for a change of heart. I remember secretly praying they would have no such change of heart, that their blind hatred would follow them to their graves. Hell was too good for them.

I absolutely love New York. It is by far my favorite city. I lived there a couple of years, just long enough to consider myself a New Yorker. Everytime I'd leave the city, whether by air or by car, the first thing I'd look for on my return were those two towers on the skyline. They were the first signals that I was almost home.
The first time I went back to NYC after 9/11 I instinctively looked at that place in the skyline, and was almost unbearably sad at the emptiness. There was too much sky. I've gone back a few times since then and still haven't quite adjusted to the alteration.
I cannot believe that its been four years since that day. I wish I could say that was the only time I had seen such devastation and loss, but the last couple of weeks have made that untrue. The sadness, helplessness, and anger, all over again. But also the generosity and compassion that such events bring. At the end of the darkness, always a bit of light.