Native Coloradans have something of a handicap: They will never know the thrill of arriving in the Rockies for the first time. Before moving here permanently from the unyielding flatness of the Midwest, we came out with our two sons every spring or summer.
On that first trip, there was the initial disappointment of learning that the mountains did not begin precisely at the Kansas line and that we would have to drive another four hours. Then came the shouts of joy when we first spied a slight aberration on the horizon, which definitely was not a low-lying cloud but a real mountain. We were climbing, gradually, into air that would soon have a delicacy, a fragrance that would enchant us.
During those first few trips we seemed hungry to see the Colorado Rockies all at once. We nagged the boys to stay on the paths in the fragile tundra along Trail Ridge Road, the longest highway above tree-line in the world. We bought souvenirs (Our younger son`s first purchase was a rubber tomahawk made in Taiwan).
As we learned about life zones, we stopped looking for magpies in the higher elevations or expecting to see ptarmigans and other high-country birds in the grassy foothills. We soon could identify foxtail pine by the shape of the needle-clusters, and Douglas fir by the little three-pronged cones. We watched for the pasque flower in the spring, and when the lowly dogbane turned dry in September, we took it as the first sign of approaching winter.
Always we rejoiced to find a patch of snow, gritty with the dust of summer, lying on some protected north slope. As we made snowballs we invariably shook our heads in wonder: snow in August!
Since I retired from academic life in Illinois and Virginia, my home has been in the foothills around Colorado Springs. My nearest neighbors are a mile away, and in the course of a week I see more mule deer than people and more jet-black squirrels with tufted ears than I can possibly shoo away from my birdfeeder. Yet in half an hour I can pull up in front of the famed Broadmoor Hotel, my four-wheel-drive vehicle encrusted with mud and my scuffed boots unseemly upon the red-carpeted foyer. The parking attendant will take my car while a silver Mercedes from Las Vegas or Houston waits behind it to be parked.
Now, after many years here, we seldom notice sunrises unless they are spectacular, painted in the gaudiest of colors and accented by swatches of luminous herringbone-patterned cloud. Our sons, now grown, still see the magic when they come to visit. They coax us to places like the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, at the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley, where shadowed vales of sand are so immense they distract attention from the Sangre de Cristo peaks rising before them.
They take us to ghost towns with names such as Apex, Bonanza and Ophir, where there is absolute finality in the
sagging false-front buildings, the heaps of mine tailings, the rusting iron implements that only an old-time miner could identify. Even more poignant are the former ghost towns that wouldn`t die: places like Telluride and Westcliffe and Cripple Creek, trying to survive by re-enacting their past. Here young people are renovating houses, opening little shops with flair and taste and combing the libraries for local history to enrich the nostalgia. There`s skiing in winter, off-road trips into the high country in summer, ”and don`t forget the concert down by the creek at dinnertime.”
These trips remind us that even in the mountains of Colorado there are distinct regional differences: Durango in the southwest, named for a city and state in Mexico, reminding us of our strong Spanish and Indian heritage; Rocky Mountain National Park in the north, a happy mix of craggy peaks, fast streams and lush forests; Colorado Springs in the south-central region, built first as a pleasure resort and spa and today still a tourist playground but also a flourishing military and electronics center. Many of the leaders in the arts, education and local government of Colorado Springs once were soldiers at Camp Carson (now Ft. Carson) during World War II and felt compelled to return.
If your birth certificate is right, your car can sport a bumper sticker that says ”Native,” implying that the rest of us Coloradans were not as well-born. The problem with the word ”native” is that it does not explain whether one`s forebears were the mysterious Anasazi, who built the awesome cliff dwelllings at Mesa Verde, or the Fifty-Niners who hurried west to search for gold on the eastern slope of the Front Range. Conceivably the ancestors of these native Coloradans were the descendants of Spanish sojourners who were calling Pikes Peak Sierra del Almagre long before the American Army officer and explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike caught sight of it. But more likely they were the offspring of Easterners or Midwesterners, like myself, who emigrated in this century just a bit earlier than we.
Rocky Mountain history goes back a long way for Americans. Spanish missionaries and soldiers were in this region while we were fighting the American Revolution in 1776. But the part we fondly if arrogantly call ”our” history is so new that a reporter with a tape recorder can spend a morning talking with those who saw some of it happen as children.
I tried it myself once, at our monthly meeting of Westerners, a group of Old West buffs.
”What`s so different about this place?” I asked our oldest member, a woman in her 80s.
”The mountains,” she said. ”Oh, the mountains! Some folk came West for those tall grass prairies and all, but just give me these mountains!”
What do we Westerners talk about at our meetings? Railroads, lots of railroads, because the narrow-gauge lines made much of our expansion possible. And mining–this mother lode and that, and how much someone`s first panful of ”color” was worth in 1858 dollars. A former mayor collects exonumia–bank notes, canceled checks and the like–and is forever giving away stock certificates from the old mining companies. At one meeting a revered older member sang songs that were popular in Denver saloons a century ago.
For a long time after the Louisiana Purchase of 1804 made the Colorado Rockies a United States possession, the area was only a curiosity. President Thomas Jefferson thought of it as part of a giant reservation where the Indians in settled areas could be sent while learning to lead a so-called civilized life.
The mountains were a haven and a place of business for men who preferred the wild life. Bent`s Fort on the Arkansas River was a way station for trappers bound for the high country and for traders carrying fancy goods to Santa Fe. Lush ”holes” or valleys in the mountains were the sites of an annual rendezvous where fur traders swapped pelts and goods, broke out the whiskey and provided some monumental silliness that 20th-Century moviemakers would commit to film.
The gold rush of the late 1850s was short-lived. Miners were panning and digging in the wrong places, but it gave men from the Midwest a taste of a life that many could not resist. Even the Civil War, which normally brings to mind such places as Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Bull Run, had its western phases. Coloradans marched south to defeat a Confederate force at Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe.
Colorado was part of the Kansas Territory until 1861, when a new territory (almost named Jefferson) was established to serve as a governmental unit until statehood came in 1876. Since it was
a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, we called ourselves the Centennial State.
Colorado gold strikes came long after those of California, Nevada and Montana were history. The secret was to forget the east side of the Front Range and try the other side. A lucky miner, Robert Womack, found enough gold at Cripple Creek in 1890 to turn that place into a boomtown for a few years. The miners of a generation earlier had worked only the surface, looking for loose gold; the new breed brought in machinery, dug great shafts and separated the buried gold from its matrix of quartz and other minerals.
Maybe the men and women who built cabins and then cities in the Rockies were not much different from those who busted sod in eastern Colorado or raised cattle on the long western slope. Maybe we newcomers aren`t, either. There is a test that tells whether the essence of Colorado has somehow got into your veins:
You`ll know if you feel vaguely uncomfortable below an altitude of 7,000 feet; if you fly home to Peoria and think it is hot and humid there when your Illinois kinfolk are calling it a fine day; if you can`t adjust to air conditioning in restaurants because you don`t need it at home; if the summer season is too short to grow tomatoes; if a black bear pulls down your hummingbird feeder while you watch from the kitchen window; if the phrase ”50 inches of powder and packed powder” sends you racing for your skis; if you feel safer easing your car around tight curves on a narrow mountain road than meeting all those speedsters down on the interstate. Then your test has come up positive.
We mountain people have not lost touch with our roots; we brought our cultural baggage with us. We hold classical music festivals at Aspen and celebrate jazz at Telluride. Our colleges and universities must turn away a large number of potential students from the East. A unique travel club in Denver has thousands of members and a fleet of airplanes, and among its most popular trips are those to such cradles of civilization as Greece, Rome, Ephesus and the antiquities along the Nile.
We watch the license plates of summer with interest but not homesickness. There is an orange-on-blue from Pennsylvania and a white-on-green from Iowa. Red-on-yellow from New Mexico. And the ever-present black-and-white plates of friendly Texans whose state has its own wonders, but not towering, snow-capped peaks.
Although we Coloradans would not elect to live anywhere else, we envy those travelers who come here, road maps at the ready, poised for that first exhilarating glimpse of mountain. What we miss most, I think, is the memory of our two boys in the back seat, eyes dancing, as one of them shouts:
”Dad! Stop the car! There`s a deer behind those trees!”
If I have drawn a picture of the Colorado Rockies undefiled, let me amend it. As in any state, if you know where to look for smog in the air, bacteria in the water and chemicals in the soil, you can find them.
But in the long run the mountain pays us little heed. Millenia pass and the mountain stays, reforesting itself, restoring its wildlife and cleansing its streams, as if ignoring the insults we thrust upon it.
A couple of springs ago, my wife, Cathie, and I heard that the Pikes Peak Cog Railroad was running a special two-car train to the summit of the peak in time for sunrise. We thought it would be a fine thing to see the sun come up from there and to get an early morning glimpse of all those purple mountains and greening prairies of Colorado.
The other passengers were members of a railway fan club that had reserved both cars for the thrill of climbing to 14,110 feet, cog by cog, as mountain trains had been doing for decades. The rail fans wore engineers` caps and sleeve patches and were exchanging photographs of train excursions past.
It was a splendid ride, beginning in darkness as the diesel train left the station in Manitou Springs and went clanking up Engelmann Canyon. The lights from the cars would now and then reveal a white cascade in Ruxton Creek, whose waters we were narrowly skirting. During the trip of more than an hour we left the forest, made a sweep to the south around the rock-strewn shoulder of the mountain and reached the Alpine zone. Every awesome peak in the West seemed to lie before us as we veered around from west to north, then came to a stop at the summit.
We passengers climbed out into the thin, chill air, fumbling to get coats buttoned and cameras ready. Cathie and I edged ourselves onto a jumble of granite boulders about a minute before the top rim of the sun came thrusting up to break the horizon line with a flash of red and orange. To the north the city of Denver was just awakening. To the southwest, Pueblo`s lights still shone.
We shot a roll of film apiece with numbing fingers, then Cathie nudged me and pointed to our fellow passengers. Their backs were turned to the rising sun. They were taking pictures of the train. The novelty of the moment was as great for them as for us; in the mountains there is something to fascinate everyone.
I thought of Zebulon Pike, a dogged Army man who had failed to beat his way to the top of this peak in the autumn of 1806. With an apologetic nod to the spirit of that brave captain, I steered Cathie toward the summit house where the concessionaire had fresh doughnuts and steaming coffee ready.
