A Grand Adventure

Sunday, August 3, 2008

I’ve been gone from home a little over a week, but it feels like much more. I spent several days last week in Ashland, Oregon, at our annual Voice and Speech Trainers Conference. Ashland is a lovely little town. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is there, and several of their artists were presenters at our conference. We also saw three shows, the most luminous being Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." Believe it or not, I’ve never seen it—not even a horrible high school production (what can teenagers possibly understand about that play?). It was produced in their outdoor “Globe” theater. To see a good production of that wonderful play under the stars is just breathtaking. I sobbed copiously. Here's a photo of the Globe stage, with a set for 'The Comedy of Errors, the Musical." (Didn't see it.)

From Ashland I flew to Denver for the American Theater in Higher Education conference, where I am VASTA’s representative. Downtown Denver is lively, and I had a couple of great meals at Bistro Vendôme in the Laramer Square district. But yesterday, I decided to rent a car and go on a grand adventure.





The light in Denver is really fabulous, and I took this photo on my way to the car rental at 8:30 AM. Denver is going through a record-breaking heat wave (over 100 degrees many days in a row) and it was already in the 80’s at 8:30. I got my car, and began my trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. Past Boulder, I stopped at a National Park information station, with the idea that “information is good.” There, I picked up a RMN Park map and a map of Colorado, the latter, “just for fun.”


It was a beautiful drive, with stunning scenes like this one:

My first stop was Estes Park to do a little shopping. I didn’t take any photos—it looks like every little tourist town with its popcorn shops, cheap trinkets, and a few really fine stores selling Native American jewelry. (Guess where I spent my time.) Even at the Estes Park Altitude, it was warm; I’d guess in the 90’s. I had lunch there and departed for Rocky Mountain National.

I got to the entrance to the Park ($20 for an eight day pass, even if you’re only staying one day—I guess I don’t begrudge the Park Service my money) and decided that I really ought to have some water, so I back-tracked and found a welcome center and filled my empty diet Pepsi bottle. I drove back into the park, and thought it might be interesting (not for any particular reason, you understand) to take the “Ridge Road.” I tend to consult maps when I need to, and let curiosity take its course any other time. (In other words, I only use maps when I’m lost. And don’t get me started on GPS devices and internet maps, which are pretty useless in say, THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.)

As I drove the Ridge Road, it became very clear that it was a special kind of road. In fact (after I read the brochure in my hotel room later that night) I learned that it’s the highest road in North America that can take you up to Alpine tundra (most people have to climb to see it). The views were astronomical, and I’ll show a few to you here:


At the top (over 12,000 feet above sea level—that’s more than two miles) I parked my car and set out for this view:

















On the way, I ran into some yellow-bellied marmots, who didn’t seem worried about my presence until they heard the electronic tone of my camera shutter.

Being in Alpine tundra, the air was very cool (maybe in the 50’s? I couldn’t tell). The air was also very thin, and I concentrated on filling my lower lungs to get enough oxygen. Even so, I was feeling light-headed and a little woozy. As I stood on my perch, a cold wind picked up, and a thunder and lightening storm commenced. Figuring that it wasn’t smart to be the tallest thing around (even at 5’1”) during a lightening storm, I hot-stepped it back to my car to watch the show. Here’s the sequence of events:



I continued following the Ridge Road (why look at the map?) down the mountainside, and below the tree line, I stopped at a little trail to Lake Irene.

I started down the trail, happily clad in my jeans and a very thin little top I’d put on in hot-hot-hot Denver. I had no coat. As I walked it began to spit rain. Thinking it would end soon, I took shelter under a pine tree for a while, where I saw this:

The rain stopped, and I kept walking. I got to the end of that particular trail, the rain picked up in earnest, and I sat under a stand of pines to try to keep dryish. I wasn’t yet COLD, but I was wet, and I recognized that if the rain kept up, my choice was to either get soaked running back to the car (which is not easy in high altitude), or try to wait out the storm. The car was close enough that I wasn’t afraid, but I was reminded how the weather changes in the Rockies, and how the temperatures can fluxuate at high altitude.

At this point, I had a fantasy. Sort of like those “dying of heat exhaustion in the desert” fantasies, only I wasn’t. It went like this: A family of hikers walked by on the nearby Utne trail and saw my distress. They offered me their spare coat. (Who carries a spare coat when they hike?) I asked for their car model, so I could return the coat in the parking lot. They give me the coat and the information, and I walk warmly back to my car, thankfully returning the coat under their windshield wiper.

What happened was this: While I was huddled under the pines, a mother and daughter came down the trail, sensibly dressed in water repellant coats. I remarked as much to them. Several minutes later, her husband and their son joined them. It started pouring. The husband turned to me, “don’t you have a coat?” I said no, but I was standing under the trees. He offered me his coat and I said, “but then you’ll be wet and cold.” He replied “no, I’ll just jog back to the car,” and handed me his coat before he ran off. His son, wife, and daughter followed him. I gratefully put on the coat, covered up my camera, and made my way back to the parking lot. Those of you who know me and my stories know that I often meet helpful strangers when I travel, some more mysterious than others. Was this one of them? Did my fantasy draw this family to me? Am I just a lucky slob when I travel? Don’t know. I’m just grateful.

On the way back to the car, I saw this little guy, a Pine Marten.
















I got back into the car and continued down the Ridge Road to the exit to the Park. It was 5-ish, but due to the rain, it was starting to be dusk. I finally decided to check my park map to see how to get back to Denver. To my surprise (like duh) there weren’t a lot of roads across the park that I could take East. In fact, the only road I could take was the Ridge Road back. Remembering the sheer drops with no guiderails, I thought that might be a bad idea in the dark. LUCKILY, I had picked up a map of Colorado earlier in the day, so I headed south, to Grand Lake, where I would take State Road 40 East back to Denver. On paper, it looks reasonably close.I got to Grand Lake, and continued south and east. State Road 40 travels south down the range, so it’s continual mountain driving, with slow uphill climbs and hairpin turns. Beautiful, and there were guardrails to keep me feeling safe.



Below is my favorite view on the way down the mountain, aside the fact that the brown pines are due to a pine beetle that normally dies off in the winter, but due to global warming, the winters here have not been cold enough for the last ten years to kill it.

THREE HOURS LATER (my drive to Estes Park took 90 minutes) I was back in Denver and began a search for a gas station to fill up my rental car. Unlike Cleveland and Chicago, Denver doesn’t seem to need to gas up in the inner city. The inner city is kind of separated from it’s western suburbs by loads of tourist attractions built on their river (an aquarium, an amusement park, the stadium). Therefore, it took me a while to find a way west to find a gas station, but I did, and all was well. I sat down to dinner at 9PM.

All and all, a thoroughly grand adventure. My plane leaves for Cleveland at 7PM tonight, which means I’ll be home around 1AM Cleveland time. Hello to my cats, and to bed.