Bummer Town

It was a descent back into civilization. Aaaand it was depressing. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a city in terms of the rural place that it originated from. Denver is in a desert valley just like like all the other desert valleys I just spent a month riding through. Except this valley is filled with lights and McDonald’s and billboards and an intricate system of highways. 

Now I’m not ready to move out to the country or anything. When traveling through some of these rural areas, the thought of living there struck me as oppressive. Oppressive because there is just nothing. Where is the yoga studio? Where can I get brunch on Sunday? How could you I ever visit friends if they live 30 miles away? I live in a small city now, but I lived in Chicago for three years. I really liked it. I liked the lights and the bustle and constant movement. But I only knew Chicago in terms of the city- I didn’t start with the wetlands of the Great Lakes and the empty places of Wisconsin and Michigan. It was easy to disassociate the cement with wild place it used to be.

Even the thought of the ariel view from Florida was contextualized differently. From the plane, our landscape is pockmarked with lakes, cut through with snaking rivers, surrounded by an ever-rising blue ocean, blanketed in trees. And then there are these deformities junking it all up— straight grey highways, asphalt wastelands, and subdivisions. GOOD LORD THE SUBDIVISIONS. Our whole state is a swamp, and we’ve spent the past 200 years draining it to make it habitable. We’ve done a great job of it, clearing out mangroves so we can be left wide open to the track of hurricanes, draining marshland for cattle grazing so the runoff can pollute our waterways, developing our cities till they are an indistinguishable blob of Starbucks and Hobby Lobby. 

As we descended the last mountain range the houses littered the highway in messy clumps. It seemed like every other yard had a scrap heap out back. The power lines transformed from a solitary telephone wire to a tangle of crisscrossing towers. Then we passed a modern day mine, today’s answer to all the turn of the century mines that gave Southwest Colorado a reason to be inhabited. Well they blew up a mountain to extract molybdenum, and all the water and dirt and rock leftover from the blasts is filling up the valley. But we can’t make steel without molybdenum, so we have to keep mining it. 

There are no easy fixes for Colorado or Florida or the planet. I’m not gonna spout conservationist lingo about going green by buying fancy products or switching to solar. None of that will fix anything. The only thing that will work is every human being on the Earth changing their idea of what land means— it’s not a commodity to be traded for greater economic development or a set of disparate objects waiting for us to use it. 

It is, in fact, what Deep Ecology and almost every indigenous culture on the planet claims it to be, which is a complicated web of habitats, natural forces and life that have inherent worth regardless of their use to human beings. That comes in to focus much more clearly after spending time away from lots of people, waking up with the sun, and reading Travis’ book of Indian narratives in which native people lament the loss of everything bountiful and beautiful at the coming of the White culture. 

But whatever. I’m not a climate activist. I haven’t made my career by organizing people to fight our imminent collapse. I drive a car way too much; I take cross-country flights; a good portion of my life is taken up with buying things. I do, however, make my living in a way that I feel good about, and I get to do my small part of education by the way that I farm. 

I don’t use synthetic chemicals to fertilize my crops, kill unwanted insects or destroy weeds. I don’t use genetically modified seeds, and I do my best to not buy processed food (which in America means it contains GM ingredients 99% of the time). I educate my friends, family, and customers about eating locally to cut down on carbon emissions which are a result of buying tomatoes that come from Mexico when it’s not tomato season in Florida. Our environmental crises have are major issues for me, and always have been since I started the Earthsavers Club in 2nd grade. I have found that organic farming and education are the best avenues for me to make my pitiful little difference, and that’s why I’ve stuck with it for all these years. 

So I felt slightly melancholy upon our entrance to the world of cities. Not only because of the city part, but because our trip was basically over. We had no more places to ride to, just a car ride to the airport. The journey was over just like that. But at least we ended up in Denver, which is a pretty cool city, despite the fact that it’s a city.  

Thirty Miles of Sand

Remarkably, we reached Sand Dunes National Park in like an hour. Wat?? Cars are just so fast! The Sand Dunes are part of a pretty remarkable ecosystem made up of several habitats, and host several organisms that aren’t found anywhere else in the world. They are mostly bugs. The Dunes are huge, the tallest one is 750 ft tall, and the main Dunefield stretches out for 30 miles. That’s a shit ton of sand. 

They are formed by a intricate combination of natural forces, as all of these crazy landscapes are. Winds from the West blow sand in from the desert in the valley, which collects at the foot of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains. Then, wind blowing down from the mountains whips the sand up into these dune formations. Spring creeks, formed from snowmelt, carry the sand back down to the foot of the main dune field, completing the cycle and keeping all the sand in place. Ta da! That’s my reeeally rough scientific explanation. I realized that I am not great at understanding geological tables which explain this stuff. In any case, these dunes formed thousands of years ago, and the same sand has been recycling though the system in that time. The result is this strange mountain of beach sand perched right in the middle of a typical Colorado mountain scape. It’s pretty neat. 

I’m not gonna lie, I was not super pumped about the dunes. I’m from Florida. I’ve seen sand. I’ve even seen sand dunes. These dunes are cool and everything, but I was tired and wasn’t thrilled about walking out straight uphill through some sand. On top of that, it started raining and lightening. So I walked out with Travis and Clint for a little, but they had some male need to climb to the top of the highest dune, while I had a need to use the bathroom. 

Other people seemed like they were having more fun— kids obviously love sand and they were jumping around in it, and you can rent sand boards to skirt down the slopes like a snowboard. All I could think about were the buckets of sand they were going to have in their shoes. I was dunzo. 

By this time we had entered the Eastern part of the state. Terrain-wise, it’s very similar. Population-wise, it’s basically another state. Southwest Colorado is so rural that we just got used to seeing single-pole electric lines carrying enough power for the whole county and roadsigns announcing 60 miles till the next town. But now we were driving through our last set of mountains on our way to Denver, and this was a whole new story. 

Aliens!

It was pretty surreal to ride around in a car again. Yeah, yeah, we had gotten rides before but this felt a little different. We packed into Clint’s roommate’s Explorer and headed back to Saguache for breakfast at the diner, but this time the journey to cover the distance from the hot springs to the town only took 20 minutes instead of two hours. Which was great because Travis and I ordered half the menu, which included homefries with eggs smothered in green chili, a large blueberry pancake, french toast, fried eggs, bacon, and coffee. Sometimes diners are the best.

We had stop along the way before we got to the sand dunes, a little spot recommended to us by a few people— the UFO Watchtower in Hooper.

Apparently there has been a lot of extraterrestrial activity in the San Luis Valley, and in order to alert the internet about these sitings you have to hire a web designer who thinks 1996 was the best year of the internet. We knew we were on right path to the Watchtower when we saw handmade painted roadsigns that read, “You’re on the Cosmic Highway”, held by a wooden cutout bugeye alien. After paying our $5 to enter, we were greeted by this impossible little creature named Vi, who offered me a rock sandwich with ketchup and ranch. It was delicious.

This place is just pathetic enough and just genius enough to leave me torn. Pathetic because the Watchtower is the height of a second story hotel balcony, made of fencing material and equipped with sun-weathered lawn chairs for those who want to do some serious alien hunting. Pathetic because someone was hired to build a little dome-shaped structure for the gift shop, but they apparently lacked engineering skills because the building is cracking apart. Pathetic because Vi’s mother sits all day in said cracking building in wretched desert silence, selling terribly-printed Watchtower t-shirts, Chinese-made bugeye alien keychains, alien abduction memoirs, and a dwindling supply of Fritos.

Genius because the woman who started this thing, Judy Messoline, is turning lemons into alien lemonade in this shithole little town of Hooper, CO. Travis read a part of her self-published memoir and learned that she bought the land in the valley to try her hand at ranching, but it wasn’t working out and she was going broke. So she took a (GIANT) risk and built this Watchtower, based on rumors that people had seen UFOs in the area. Judy herself has never seen one. Now she has this silly gift shop, tent and RV camping, and people coming from all over the world to visit a tourist trap that she made up in order to not go broke.

Apparently she only has to make $100 a day to stay in business, and from looking back at her guestbook, she has between 20-30 visitors to pay the entrance fee that provide’s Vi’s mom with what looks like one of maybe three jobs available in Hooper. So, pretty genius.

We looked for some aliens.

We visited the rock garden (20 psychics visited the spot and told Judy she needed a spiritual rock garden, though she didn’t know the first thing about rock gardening).

We wished there were better graphic designers/screen printers in Hooper who could print better Watchtower t-shirts. We chatted with Vi a little more, and peaced out.

Sagauche Road

After grocery shopping, re-watering, coffee-drinking, using WIFI and sandwich-eating in Gunnison, we were finally ready to leave on the final stretch of our journey. It was about 6:00 pm.

We started out for Highway 114, or Saguache Road. Saguache is pronounced sa-WATCH. It’s another Ute Indian name, like Ouray. I had done some map studying, and this road was even more desolate than the West Elk Loop. There were no towns listed here, not for over 60 miles. It was exciting to get out of town again, and this road was beautiful.

Travis found us a Forest Service road leading up through the canyon, and just five minutes later we were in the middle of nowhere. No telephone lines, no road. Just Mesa and sagebrush and sunset. Definitely the best campsite as of yet.

The next morning we climbed slowly over our last mountain, and with the elevation came shifting landscapes. 

We started with flat grassy pasture, we moved through hard rock canyon, then stark sunny Mesa, and eventually we approached the alpine habitat of ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, and quaking aspens.

About these aspens. First of all they are creepy trees. Starkly creepy. They only live at high altitudes. All of their foliage is concentrated at their top branches, and when the wind blows its hard to tell if there’s running water nearby or if it’s their leaves fluttering.

The leaves are green on top and silver on bottom, so that wind causes them to looks like they’re shimmering. Their trunks are white, and at each spot where a branch was formerly connected to the truck, a scar remains that looks exactly like an eye. A human eye.

White trunks covered in eyes, staring at you as the leaves quiver like the tree is coming to life. Also, aspen groves are thought to be the single largest organism on the planet, because the roots of each tree are connected underground. Aspen groves are one giant tree with many trunks, reproducing by offshoots. How’s that for a forest?

The last of the climb was North Cochetopa Pass, climaxing with a two mile summit. This was after about six hours of climbing, and it was steep enough that some backpackers we encountered thought to give us some encouragement. “You’re doing a good job!” one girl called to me as we passed her, biking about as fast as she was walking. Then it was over, and we had reached the Continental Divide.

We didn’t celebrate too hard or anything. Did I mention I found an elk skull? We poured a drop of whiskey on the ground, in hopes that it would reach us over in the Atlantic someday.

We stopped to camp near the top of the summit so we could catch an epic sunset. There were some cliffs near the campsite that looked promising, so we scurried up the rocks to catch the view. The perspective changes dramatically when you climb straight up with no switchbacks. We reached a good vantage point and watched an evening thunderstorm approach.

Unfortunately, it approached right on top of us. I was counting seconds between lightening and thunder, and in about five minutes it went from 10 seconds till thunder to instantaneous. That is scary. And loud. We hightailed it back to the tent, where the rain had left our site unscathed, then built our only campfire of the trip and succeeded in not starting a forest fire. It rained one more time and put out our cinders.

The next day we were halfway to Saguache, which was the first town in the San Luis Valley at the bottom of the mountain. There was a quick descent, followed by some flat, dry riding through the valley. We were popped out onto the highway, then found ourselves in downtown Saguache. First stop was lunch at the 4th St Diner, a darling little restaurant that served travelers, grizzled ranchers, and new transplants alike. And the food was good! Even this little place had local grassfed beef burgers and peach milkshakes made with local fruit. That’s hard to top. After a good respite, Travis, the elk skull and I headed through the flat sagebrush land into the storm of doom.

Being so wide open, you can see storms accumulating and rain falling from miles away, but even that visual warning couldn’t prepare us for the headwind we were making a beeline for. We had been trucking along on the flat highway feeling pretty good about ourselves and the strength of our massive thigh muscles, but then that wind knocked us back to like 4 mph. We took a side road that paralleled the highway, and of course it started paved and transitioned to gravel. However, we somehow missed the storm. By the time we made it over to the mountains that framed the East side of the valley, the ground was wet but the rain had moved North. Lucky lucky.

We were approaching the Orient Land Trust, our destination for the evening. Our path was out of the valley and to the foot of the mountain. Somehow this was one of the toughest little segments of the trip— it was only six miles, but the road was gravel and agonizingly straight and inclining verrry slowly.

We could see the cluster of buildings where we would be staying during the entire ride, but it never seemed to get closer because there were no markers to pass, only sagebrush desert. We creeped and creeped along, and by the time we reached the driveway of the camping area, each pedal stroke was a nightmare. Luckily, we had spent the last two hours riding to a HOT SPRING.