The Scottish Highlands of Colorado

It's easy to miss opportunities in Colorado because it is just too easy to be sucked into the stereotypical postcards, such as an alpine lake at the foot of mountains. Such things are nice of course, but when you've seen 'em, you've seen 'em.

To enjoy landscapes for any length of time you need to branch out into new directions -- something that takes more imagination on your part.  Besides simple laziness, a middle-class traveler has the additional problem that his entire mindset is geared towards being a mass-consumer; and scenery tourism is just one more form of bar-coded  "consumption" to him.

Most people, like me, also need to fight against a complacent surrender to "the medium is the message."  The three-dimensional attractions of the desert (or grasslands or ridgey hills) do not show up so well in a two-dimensional medium like photography.

The reward for this kind of cantankerous independence is a greater appreciation for what is on the western edge of the San Luis Valley. A normal windshield tourist might easily think, "Not bad. But it will never make the front cover of a glossy travel magazine. Therefore I must go to XYZ National Park in order to consume a more upscale brand of scenery."  But a horseman -- or his modern reincarnation, the mountain biker -- will fall in love with this topography. Even more, in a rainy spell, the decomposed granite geology keeps you free of ooze and muck.

 

 

 

One morning Coffee Girl and I were exploring the high BLM valley when I heard the screams of a coyote. Then it sounded like a dog. Can a coyote really be so polyphonous? Why wasn't I willing to consider the possibility of the eerie sounds coming from two separate animals?

The sounds came from fog-enshrouded cliffs. A low ridge in the foreground blocked the view towards the bottom of those cliffs.  But the setting affected me strongly, just as many movie viewers are probably affected by the scene in Rob Roy (1995), when the English soldiers, led by the villain, hunted down Rob Roy and his clan in the foggy highlands of Scotland.

 

I've hardly known any RVers in my 16 years in this racket who had any interest in bicycling, so the exceptions are worth bragging about. When one RV/cycling friend was taking a cycling tour of Scotland he said that the place would be jammed with tourists if it just didn't have such dreadful weather. Colorado, of all places, has been having Scottish weather the last few weeks. 

It hardly seems possible to feel a connection with Scotland from the vantage point of Colorado BLM hills. There is sagebrush here, not heather. But what matters is what James Boswell called 'the rude grandeur of Nature': the treeless openness, the unpopularity, and the fog.

Travel has changed so much the last couple centuries that you might be interested in what it used to be like. Consider the short and easy-to-read book by Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, free from Gutenberg.