Colorado: One Last Visit, One Last Canyon

My long detour into Colorado was for the sake of a spending a day with a very good friend whom I hadn’t seen in way too long: Hillery McCalister, who lives with her husband Bruce (and parrot Wallace) in the normally inaccessible-to-Miatas-in-December mountain town of Leadville.  Not only did Pepin and I luck out with weather (there was nary a flake of snow on the USA East of the Cascades, and I actually drove through Nebraska on a 75° day with the top down), but Hillery and Bruce weren’t even in Leadville, having relocated for the winter to the slightly lower-altitude town of Hotchkiss. 

The latter village is still in the Rockies, and a quick shout-out to the road that gets you there: Colorado Route 92, a swooping two-lane roller coaster through deserted chasmic canyonland and a Miata delight.  Without betraying my speedometer’s secrets I admit to taking corners with abandon, to enjoying the echo of my climbing accelerations off the mountain walls, and of course to driving with the top down on a 40° December day.  I brushed cold tears from my cheeks as I flashed through slanted stands of mountain birch under a white chromium sun.

I didn’t get any photos, as that road required both hands on the wheel and preferred momentum over viewpoint turnouts, but I took plenty the next day when Hillery and Bruce took me to their local attraction: the amazing Black Canyon.

Before we got there, however, and during, and afterwards, I had a wonderful renunion with the two of them.  They were superb hosts, treating me to meals and offering me a cozy guest room in their house that’s still partly under renovation, and we filled every spare minute with talk, catching up on each others’ lives. 

Hillery and Bruce's house

Their experience oddly mirrored my 6-month road-trip one: after a death in the family and the sudden closing of their long-standing antique business, they’ve come to their half-finished Hotchkiss house for 6 months in a sort of free fall to figure out their lives.  They were oddly sympathetic to my mad plan of trying to drive a Miata to Tierra del Fuego following my layoff.

Hillery with Bruce and with me

Oh, you noticed the background.  Yes, that's Black Canyon.

Black Canyon is a National Park, but after seeing it I wondered why it isn’t better known.  Of all the canyons I’ve enjoyed on this trip it’s the most dramatic, if not the deepest certainly the steepest, carved by a river that descends as it flows and thus moves faster, sawing the canyon so quickly (in geologic terms) that the sides haven’t had time to erode apart.  One walks practically to the edge without even seeing it, at which point an adze-hack halfway to Hell opens up beneath your feet and you’re staring at sheer walls of the Earth’s crust plunging downward, laced with eon-buried veins of quartz as if lacerated open the instant before they bleed.  Over half a mile below, and seemingly directly under the vertiginous railing in your fists, snakes the river with a steady soft roar.  The mighty crags, slabs, towers and terraces buttressing the two canyon sides are so close together that it feels sort of like an avenue of skyscrapers viewed from above, except you realize that THIS is the real emotion after which our puny cities strive.

The park (one can access it on either side, but on our side for free) consists of a a dirt road that follows the canyon, offering regular viewpoints where they’ve built balconies over the abyss, each one offering a completely different view thanks to the canyon's slow curve.  We were there on a day of cold, strong sunshine, with almost no one else around, and at each viewpoint we walked through scratch pine woods breathing the pure mountain air tinted with resin and stone. 

I very much missed my dearly departed Canon T6i, as my iPad camera struggled with the contrasts in the bright sun, and only a few of my photos were salvageable in later software rescue work.  I was very jealous of the Swede we met who carried a massive zoom lens on a three-day photo shoot in the canyon.

Afterwards, tired from the fresh air and the grandeur, we had lunch at a wonderful farm-to-table restaurant called The Living Farm in the tiny but surprisingly sophisticated town of Paonia.  The town has a magnificent movie theater, and we considered returning for an evening show of the newest “Thor” movie.  Once back at the house, however, we realized our foolishness: we needed every moment we had to talk!