Occupation of Independence

It was time for one last ride near Leadville, CO. It was my first time here and I have sort of fallen in love with the place. I chose to mountain bike up a dead end road; they are unpopular with weekenders. Heck, they were even unpopular with me during the first couple years of full time RV boondocking. It took some real effort to break away from the nearly universal preference for a loop road. On the ride we passed a fine old cabin. Apparently somebody lived in it, at least seasonally. It had a marvelous view back to Mt. Elbert. When I hike or bike uphill I never turn around, per Satchel Paige's classic advice. But in this case I'm glad I did. Although it was only mid-morning Mt. Elbert already had a canopy of threatening clouds. We explored a bit more before returning.  Coming down was such a glide! At one point I went to check out a spur road that went up an exposed ridge, my favorite topographic form. The freshening breeze was so delightful, on a day when most

While slaving away on editing my old blog posts I was distracted by the most boisterous musicality of some bird in the area. His tail was about as long as his body, proper, and the tail had white bars, I think. His topside was grey. I get a lot of satisfaction catching a "greedy little songbird" (recall the movie, "Amadeus") in the act. As usual click to enlarge, or go to my Picasa web albums by clicking the Photo Albums link near the top of the home page.

When traveling I try to experience a book, rather than merely read it. With some luck a traveler's location can add something chemical and explosive to the book. This happened to me recently in Leadville, CO. I was camped by a national forest road that was on the race course of two separate races that featured the most amazing athletes. My mind drifted off to Greek Olympic athletes. I picked up a book on Greek mythology, and was amazed to find myself actually interested in that silly nonsense, for the first time. Other things contributed to this chemical reaction, such as monsoon clouds accumulating before their mid-afternoon schedule, and lightning strikes so close to my trailer that they sounded like a shotgun blast outside the trailer door. So I was willing to play along with reading about Zeus the Cloud-Gatherer and Thunderbolt-Thrower. If this seems too whimsical for the reader, remember that your mind and body are the same as the homo sapiens of a few thou

Since arriving in Colorado I have been extolling its outdoors exercise cult to the point of boosterism. It's time for a little balance. This weekend Leadville had a 100 mile Run! Runners had 30 hours to complete it. I'm not sure of all the rules, but apparently they could walk or rest whenever they needed to. But they had to make intermediate cutoff points by the deadline or be disqualified. The 100 miles had its share of climbs of course. The altitude varied between 9500 and 12000 feet. In the afternoon the runners had to contend with rain and lightning. I saw some of the survivors crawling in on Sunday morning. Some hobbled in, looking very sore. Why is there this obsession in running, biking, etc., with enormous distances? Why not shorten the distance, increase the speed and intensity of the race, and make it more interesting by some other angle? My best efforts at amateur psychoanalysis is that these people have a drastic self-esteem problem that can only

West of Leadville CO a couple summers ago. We started on the dirt road that leaves the Turquoise Lake paved road. What better way to start a day than to find yourself on a smooth, well-maintained road that ascends mildly but relentlessly to a high mountain pass! A mountain biker notices road texture more than scenery, no matter how "breathtakingly beautiful" the postcard scenery might be. This road seemed determined to give us a perfectly balanced ride. In particular I loved the variety of viewscapes . As the ride developed I felt an overarching sense of gratitude. Perhaps because the object of my gratitude was so nebulous, the gratitude seemed more transcendent than the alpine vistas themselves. Only a few gasoline athletes passed us. Do they resent us?  In their minds they are adventuring with mighty jeeps, big 'tars,' winches, fancy GPS gadgets, and all. Sometimes they even caravan--there's safety in numbers, you know. Then they pass a litt

My favorite seasons as a full time RVer are the shoulder seasons, when I have to form some sort of plan for the upcoming migration. In autumn the most fundamental question is whether you want to travel in the winter or hibernate in "townie" mode. The case could easily be made that an RVer needs some balance over the course of a year. From a travel point of view, North America shrinks in the winter, so it might be preferable to go into "townie" mode in the winter, if townie mode one must go. The biggest advantage of townie mode is that you get to know people. In contrast, when I'm in travel mode I make Thoreau at Walden Pond look like a social butterfly. And he only lived there two years! If only I actually liked one of the warm spots of Arizona! The large cities are just smaller versions of LA. There are few medium sized cities in the snowbird  areas of the Southwest. Yuma is so crowded, and it's hardly a bargain anymore. And the small towns ar

There's cute and then there's... She's a yorkie-poo, two months old. Click photo to enlarge, or click the (blue) "photo albums" link at the top of home page.

We are camped in the national forest right on the route of the recently completed Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race. The other day we rode a forest road up to the foot of Mt. Elbert, the tallest peak in Colorado. The most pleasant surprise was the marvelous, hard-packed, sandy texture of that particular forest road. I couldn't get the word ' orogeny ' out of my mind. What a beautiful word. It means mountain-building. Of course the opposite of orogeny is just as important. Erosion is one way to look at it. As detritus is swept down the side of a mountain, to the valley, the small stuff should drop out last, at lower altitude. Indeed we were benefiting from that today on the ride. The forest was a lodgepole pine monoculture. If ever a tree was aptly named, it is the lodgepole pine. The forest was as bland as you can imagine, but it wasn't as dark and depressing as a spruce/fir forest. When I stopped pedaling and held my breath, I could hear nothing--no

This was only the second festival weekend for me this summer. Previously I gave up on the game plan of visiting one summer festival after another. I'm glad Leadville's Boom Days is one of my successes. Some people fit in so well with the historical look, you have to wonder what they do the rest of the year. I could live without the Doc Holliday and saloon girl schlock. Ahh, now this is better: How resplendent she had been in the parade! Afterwards at a food booth, she dropped something and a man came running up to pick it up for her. I was fumbling with the camera, and didn't see it, but let's hope she repaid him with a little curtsy.  What a sap I am for anything archaic! What a loss it is to civilization that women no longer "wear" parasols. I'll bet they used to be as expressive with them as a dog is with its tail. On Sunday it was time for the crowd-pleaser: the burro race up to Mosquito Pass. Just imagine running, walking, and pulling

Eighty percent of the discomfort felt by a full time RV boondocker occurs during summer. It needn't be so. Step One is to stop going north in summer, as counter-intuitive as that is. Going north will only keep you cool during the shoulder seasons. Would that they lasted longer than a couple weeks! Shame on me for taking so long to realize that latitude is a secondary variable and that altitude is preeminent. Through a geographical accident, most of the high altitude towns are in the Southwest. It's easy to underestimate the pleasantness of the southwestern monsoon season, from early July to mid-September. Even before the afternoon sky-and-cloud show, the higher humidity mutes the sun. By noon cumulus clouds have formed foamy white tops and darkling bottoms. Their bottoms darken as the vertical development continues. Finally they flocculate into a thundershower -- transient, local, and topographic. This praise of clouds and rain must seem surreal to those of the P

Leadville, CO. The Benchmark Atlas labeled nearby Mosquito Pass, elevation 13,186 feet, as the "highest auto (jeep) pass in the US." Which of my four bicycles would be best? I smiled thinking of the beginning of the Spaghetti Western, "For a Few Dollars More." The bounty hunter, Lee Van Cleef, has only a few seconds to shoot the bad guy who is getting away. The bounty hunter pulls a string on his saddle, and a leather rack of four guns rolls down the side of the horse: his tools of the trade, for every occasion. The road started smooth and steep, which is my favorite kind of road. It wasn't long before I saw something unusual: a large group of fully-loaded backpackers, who would coalesce and then disperse. It was a church group from Texas, on its way over the pass. We caught up with them at the last mining tower, near tree-line, where you can faintly see the two thousand feet of switchbacks that await these hikers from sea-level homes. Faith can m