I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
“Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other,” geographer Yi-Fu Tuan wrote in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977). We need both rootedness (place) and openness (space). I have found both in Colorado, and so has Ray. This is one reason we connect so well.
We both have topophilia for Colorado, that love of place that Tuan has written of. We have an emotional and spiritual attachment to the landscape of this state where we each have experienced so much, as children and as adults. These experiences have formed us, grounded us, and given us a way to transcend the mundanities of life.
On Wednesday, Ray and I took a 400-mile drive to get out of Denver and into the mountains. We thought we might see some fall color, and we did, but not too much.
It was more than a drive; it was a return to a love we both have known for decades, and a sharing of that love.
We headed down 285 over Kenosha Pass to Fairplay, then drove up and over Hoosier Pass on our way to Breckenridge. In Breck, we stopped by the condo my grandparents used to own, where I shared spaghetti dinners after ski days with my family, played Scrabble, and first learned the fragrance of mountain pines. My grandma called the condo JADA after my two cousins, my sister, and me (John-Allison-David-Anne). My younger sister Sarah missed out, because she was born too late, and JADAS just didn’t have the same ring to it.
From Breck, we drove through Copper Mountain on the way to Leadville. We stopped in Climax at the summit of Fremont Pass, where a molybdenum mine that Ray’s dad worked at for a short time is still in operation. For many years, the Climax mine supplied three-quarters of the moly the world needed, mainly for use as an alloy in hardening steel.
Climax is now considered an unincorporated mining village, but it used to be a company town, with a school, hospital, and housing for employees. Ray’s family lived in one of the apartments there for a short time before the structure had to be demolished as the mountain being mined was collapsing from the inside as its structure was removed to get the moly out.
Colorado highway 91 through Climax has been moved four times to make room for tailings ponds, paid for by the Climax mining operation. The mine produces large quantities of waste slurry, which flows into nearby reservoirs into the valley to the north. Liquid from the slurry is drained, leaving solid pulverized minerals and waste: the tailings from the mine.
It’s a strange landscape to see, completely remade by human activity.
After Leadville, we drove through Twin Lakes to Independence Pass, 12,095 feet elevation. It’s one of the highest paved crossings of the Continental Divide in the U.S. Then we headed through Aspen and on to Glenwood Springs, dropping us on I-70 back to Denver.
The fall color in Silverthorne and Frisco was starting to show, with bits of yellow turning to eye-catching orange-red. But for most of the drive we only saw green and brown, or dark red clay in Glenwood Springs.
We covered 400 miles in ten hours, making occasional stops to eat, take photos, and get gas. We shared memories of our mountain adventures while we drove, and made plans for new ones.
To have grown up here means I carry the mountains inside me, their vastness and wilderness shaping the way I think and what I seek in the world. I think it is somewhat the same for Ray.
I’ve become a connoisseur of mountain passes only late in life, because as a child, I wasn’t the one driving over them, and I left Colorado for twenty years when I went to college. So it was only in my forties that I developed an understanding and fascination about them.
When we were planning our drive, I asked Ray if he knew of Mosquito Pass, an unpaved route between Fairplay and Leadville. I was familiar with it from taking my kids on a circular road trip through central Colorado. I didn’t, at the time, think that my old Honda Odyssey would be a good vehicle to traverse the pass, but it stuck in my mind as something I’d do someday.
Not only did Ray know of it, he has actually ridden his motorcycle partway on it, but had to turn around due to large ponds of water collected on the roadway.
We agreed we’ll cross Mosquito Pass together someday. While we were driving I told him my mom is making a list of things she wants to do—not a bucket list, she clarified!—but just some plans for the future. I asked Ray what plans he had for his future. Now we have two new mountain-related items on our future plans list: a Mosquito Pass crossing and also a winter trip to Crested Butte, where we each have five ski days on our passes.
My mother grew up in Colorado too, and she tells of the harrowing drive she made with her parents and her sister over Old La Veta Pass from Alamosa to Walsenburg every Sunday for dinner with her grandparents. Now there’s a paved highway pass to the north, New La Veta Pass, via Highway 160. It might be fun to drive Old La Veta Pass someday.
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, are some of the prettiest I’ve seen. They extend down into Taos and beyond to Santa Fe. I’d love to ski Taos some day. Early season tickets at Taos Ski Valley are just $70 through December 17th!
I feel so fortunate to have grown up in Colorado, and to have returned in 2006. There is no place I’d rather build a life.